John Reed: The Making Of A Revolutionary 1163149284, 9781163149287

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JOHN REED

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK * BOSTON * CHICAGO • DALLAS ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY * CALCUTTA MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, Limited TORONTO

Portrait of John Reed painted bv Robert Hallowell and presented to Harvard University by the Harvard Alumni John Reed Committee.

Copyright, 1936, by THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1936. Reprinted June, 1936. Reprinted August, 1936.

î Printed in the United States of America :

To LINCOLN STEFFENS

CONTENTS page

CHAPTER

I.

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

i

RELEASE

16

III.

“PAIN OF GROWING, ECSTASY OF UNFOLDING”

24

IV.

TO SEE THE WORLD

51

V.

PROUD NEW YORK

64

VI.

PROFESSION: POET

91

II.

THE ROMANTIC REVOLUTION

109

BETWEEN WARS

136

THIS IS NOT OUR WAR

148

MANHATTAN REVISITED

170

EASTERN FRONT

183

BREATHING SPELL

204

XIII.

ALMOST THIRTY

228

XIV.

PASSAGE TO RUSSIA

249

XV.

THE WORLD SHAKES

268

REVOLUTIONARY AND POET

282

AMERICA, 1918

303

SPOKESMAN OF THE SOVIETS

321

DISCIPLINE

342

REVOLUTIONARY’S RETURN vii

365

VII. VIII.

IX.

X. XI.

XII.

XVI. XVII.

XVIII. XIX. XX.

CONTENTS

vin

PAGE

CHAPTER

XXL

BY THE KREMLIN WALL

3»7

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

403

APPENDIX A:

NOTES

407

APPENDIX B:

BIBLIOGRAPHY

425

INDEX

437

JOHN REED

I Boyhood In Portland

Reed was bom, October 20, 1887, in his grandmother’s mansion, Cedar Hill, and there was another celebration in a house that had come to be known for its festivities. It was a large house and possibly the most pretentious Portland could boast. Henry D. Green, who had not lived to see the birth of his first grandson, had built it ten years before on a spur of the hills west of Portland, the first of the first citizens to move away from the little cluster of wealthy homes on the flat land near the river. Cedar Hill was the show-place of the city, a real French chateau, people said, with formal gardens, stables, green­ houses, and a glass grape arbor. The child was christened John Silas in fashionable Trinity Episcopal Church, and, while Mrs. Green entertained her friends and the friends of the father and mother, Lee Sing, her cook, celebrated in his own way in his cellar room. He lit joss sticks, burned paper prayers, and gave a feast of dried shark-fins, sea­ soned chicken-gizzards, and sam-shui to his Chinese friends. Later that evening his mistress found him alone in the pantry, very drunk, with twelve of her Royal Worcester cups lined up before him, drinking whiskey out of one after the other. The chateau on Cedar Hill was the outward mark of Henry Green’s eminence among the pioneer builders of Portland. He was not quite among the first settlers, for the city had been established in 1845, and the foundations of its first fortunes had been laid in the early fifties by Henry W. Corbett, Henry Fail­ ing, William S. Ladd, and Simeon G. Reed. These were the builders of the steamship lines, the banks, and the railroads. But ohn

J

2

JOHN REED

Green had his share of the profit and the glory. He had rounded the Hom in 1853 to join his brother in Astoria, where John Green and H. C. Leonard had, three years earlier, established the only competitor of the Hudson Bay Company’s trading-post at the mouth of the Columbia River. And in 1856 he and his brother had moved their business from Astoria to Portland. Three years later the Greens founded the Portland Gaslight Company and built the first gas works in Oregon—the third, they boasted, to be constructed on the Pacific Coast. In 1861 they purchased the Portland water works from the original grantee, whose plant consisted of one mile of wooden pipe and a pump located on a small stream. Soon afterward they promoted the Oregon Iron Works Company, the first company on the Coast for smelting iron ores and manufacturing pig iron. With these three enterprises, all highly successful as Portland grew, Mr. Green had reason to compete with the city’s best in the splendor of his home. All Portland was proud of Cedar Hill and proud of its builder. Though it was common knowledge that Henry Green drank to excess, everyone pointed out that he never appeared in public when intoxicated and that, whatever his condition, he was a charming gentleman. He had died in 1885 in New York City, whither he had gone on business after visiting the New Orleans exposition and attending the inauguration of President Cleve­ land. A friend, who had been with him in Washington, wrote a fulsome eulogy for the Portland paper. “In all the countless throng of distinguished men that walked those streets, embrac­ ing the aristocracy of both continents,” he said, speaking of the inaugural ceremonies, “there was no more graceful figure nor flashing presence than the tall and sinewy figure of this repre­ sentative Oregon man, who moved through those courtly throngs with the aplomb of Alcibiades himself. . . . He will be missed by the hard-faring poor, whose sufferings he relieved and kept his munificence a profound secret. He will be missed by the rich, who know the value of that charity which gives no alms but pours out tender words in hours of grief and mental suffering. He was a self-poised character, a man who rose to

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

3

wealth without resorting to oppression and one whose courage was only equaled by his modesty.” This was John Reed’s grandfather. His grandmother, like her husband, was bom in New York State. She was the granddaugh­ ter of Christian Wilmerding, a German merchant whose de­ scendants had married into thfe richest families of the East. Char­ lotte Jones Green was quite as proud of her cousins—Paynes, Fields, and Wilmerdings—as she was of her husband’s success in pioneer Portland. Her two daughters were educated in a finish­ ing school in New York City, and she was the first woman in Portland to have a carriage, and with a coachman and a foot­ man too. After Mr. Green’s death, Cedar Hill became more famous than ever for its hospitality. Portland was both delighted and shocked by Charlotte Green’s parties. In the summer the guests danced on the lawn, which was lighted by flaring gas-jets that had been piped to the tops of the pointed firs, and in the winter the ballroom on the third floor was crowded and gay. Everyone wanted to be included in these parties, and almost everyone was. The next day those who had been shocked had plenty to dis­ cuss; those who had not were usually recovering. Portland was overwhelmingly conservative. Its early settlers had come either from New England or the older southern states, and it believed that it was less raw and western than other coast towns. On the surface, at least, it was an orderly city, proud of its churches, restrained in its manners, suspicious of gayety and color. It obliterated as quickly as possible all traces of the fron­ tier and cultivated the decorum of a Massachusetts town. Social snobbery quickly developed, and a sense of what should and what should not be done. Charlotte Green—whom everyone affectionately called Sudie—refused to conform. Exuberant, the best of good company, liked even when not approved, she went her own rather boisterous way, but at the same time insisted upon and held her position of social prestige. It was an achieve­ ment that Portland marveled at. Mrs. Green’s children were almost as popular as she. There were four of them, two boys and two girls. One of the sons, Ray, was often away in far corners of the world, but returned

4

JOHN REED

to tell hilarious stories. Both of the daughters were married soon after their father’s death: Katherine to an army officer, Lieu­ tenant Edward Burr, who was transferred not long afterward to the East, and Margaret to C. J. Reed, a promising young busi­ ness man, newly come to the city. The young C. J. Reeds thought of themselves, without im­ modesty, as belonging to Portland’s best. Margaret Reed, though less unconventional than her mother, was quite as gifted a host­ ess, a well-bred, charming, rather dainty woman, fastidious and a little proud. Charles Jerome Reed—always called C. J.—had, during his few years in the city, won a reputation both as a sound business man and as. a wit. He had come to Portland as the representative of the D. M. Osborne Company of Auburn, New York, which was his birthplace, and he supervised the sale of their agricultural implements throughout the Northwest. The business was prosperous, and he was personally so well liked that he was made a member and then the president of the exclusive Arlington Club. Presiding at the daily lunch table of the club, he jeered at all comers, and his sallies at the expense of the city’s dignitaries were quoted for many years. Indeed, his fame trav­ eled up and down the Coast, and he became a member of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco and a great favorite at its meet­ ings. John Reed was bom, as he was eventually to realize, into a position of privilege. Throughout his youth, though his father’s fortunes varied, there was never a time when he was conscious of deprivation of any sort. Without being wealthy, his mother and father were able to give him anything that a rich man’s son in the Portland of that day was likely to have. They could give him, too, the sense of being well-born, respected, superior to the mass of people. The desirability of wealth and social position was taken for granted by the Reeds. But at the same time there was a feeling that nothing could justify the sacrifice of independence. John Reed had the example of his grandmother, who insisted on living her own life as she saw fit. More important was the ex­ ample of his father, a business man and a successful one, who never hesitated to say what he thought, a bom fighter, though as yet he had found no cause worth fighting for. There were tradi­

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

5

tions of conformity and traditions of rebellion. In their genera­ tion Jack’s younger brother Harry became the conformist and Jack the rebel. “Harry is a lamb,” Mrs. Green once said, “but Jack is a lion. I prefer lions.” When the young Reeds moved to a house down in the city, there were still gay parties and many guests, and they maintained an establishment appropriate to their position. Jackie had a nurse, of course; in fact, there was a succession of them, for Mrs. Reed was not easy to work for. One of them, who remained for ten days, always remembered the little boy as affectionate, lovable, and bright. She left because Mrs. Reed rebuked her for letting a little girl from a poorer section kiss Jackie, and because she was required to wear a cap and apron. The servants John Reed best remembered were Chinese. There was a cook whom his father particularly liked, and with whom he discussed business and politics. The Chinese fascinated the little boy with their tales of ghosts, their superstitions, and the rumors of their bloody feuds. He was curious about their food and drink and all their customs. And later he attributed to his intimacy with them his easy acceptance of what was different from himself, his zest for foreign food and strange customs, his happy sharing in other ways of life than his own. The Chinese seemed romantic to John Reed. He felt, looking back, that there was something a little fantastic about his whole boyhood: pigtails and gongs and fluttering red paper, and his grandmother’s glamorous chateau with dancing under the flaring trees, and the carriage with the blooded horses and the footman. Then there was his Uncle» Ray, who was interested in coffee plantations in South America, and came home with strange tales of revolutions, battles, and treasures. Once he told how he had been a leader of a successful revolution in Guatemala, and had been made secretary of state. His first act, he said, was to appro­ priate the funds of the national treasury to give a grand state ball; his second was to declare war on Germany because he had flunked his German course in college. When John Reed discovered books, he surrendered to ro­ mance. From fairy tales, he went on to the stories of King

6

JOHN REED

Arthur, and then to history. The histories of the crusades—noble kings, knights in armor, brave crossbowmen—gripped him. He began to invent stories of his own, telling them to the children of the neighborhood, whom he terrified with his accounts of the monster called the Hormuz—and terrified himself too. And in time he wrote his stories down, planned a comic history of the United States, and wrote and staged his own plays. He began to discover Portland. The Willamette River divided the city, though the area on the eastern side was largely ignored by such people as the Reeds. Its streets were muddy; some of its houses poised uncertainly on the edges of gulleys; it could be reached only by ferry. C. J. Reed, in common with other saga­ cious business men, predicted that East Portland was destined to grow with the city, and he talked about the wisdom of investing in its real estate; but he would not have thought of living there. The principal stores and office buildings—some of them six and seven stories high—were crowded together on the west side of the river. John Reed could not help noticing that most of them bore the names of his playmates—Ladd, Failing, Corbett. To the north, towards the junction of the Willamette and the Columbia, were the grain elevators and the store houses, sym­ bols of the commerce that had given Portland its fifty thousand inhabitants. To the south were the lumber mills and the woolen factories and the other industries that were beginning to change the nature of the city. Often John Reed heard his father talk about these businesses and about the great railroads and their makers, Henry Villard, E. H. Harriman, and, as time went on, James J. Hill. Not everything that C. J. Reed said about these men and their local associates—W. S. Ladd, Simeon Reed, and the others—was flattering, but his pride in Portland was unmis­ takable. If John Reed wanted to go from the apartment hotel in which he spent part of his boyhood to his grandmother’s mansion, he walked up from the river-bank towards the fir-clad hills on the western horizon. From the narrow streets and the low, compact buildings, he mounted to the region of churches and middle-class homes. Portland was proud of its churches, dozens of them, rep­ resenting almost every denomination in the country. Churches,

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

7

schools, hospitals—the marks of the culture the city coveted. And at last Reed would come to the West End, where some of the wealthy lived in decorous Queen Anne houses, and above them all his grandmother’s house. Now, looking back, he gazed over the city to Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, and Moûnt Adams, their white peaks always dominating the city on the east and the north. The whole city spread before him, neat roofs, green lawns, proud spires, sloping down to the curving river. And to the north there was the Co­ lumbia, bearing the boats of the Pacific trade. It was a beautiful city, though it touched John Reed’s imagination far less than other cities he was to know. His mother and father sent him and his brother to the Port­ land Academy, a private school with a good reputation. For the first two or three years school excited him, for he seemed to be learning so much that he had wanted to know, but then it grew dull, and thereafter only an unusual subject or a rare teacher aroused John Reed’s interest. He was bright enough to pass, but he would not be bothered to get good marks. Later on he mar­ veled that he had tolerated the dull routine of the educational system as well as he had. “Why should I have been interested in the stupid education of our time?” he asked. “We take young, soaring imaginations, consumed with curiosity about the life they see all around, and feed them with dead technique: the flawless purity of Washington, Lincoln’s humdrum chivalry, our dull and virtuous history and England’s honest glory; Addi­ son’s graceful style as an essayist, Goldsmith celebrating the rural clergy of the eighteenth century, Dr. Johnson at his most vapid, and George EHot’s Silas Marner; Macauley and the sono­ rous oratings of Edmund Burke; and in Latin, Caeser’s Gallic guide-book and Cicero’s mouthings about Roman politics. And the teachers! Men and women—usually women—whose chief qualification is that they can plough steadily through a dull round of dates, acts, half-truths, and rules for style, without ques­ tioning, without interpreting, and without seeing how ridicu­ lously unlike the world their teachings are. I have forgotten most of it, forced on me before I was ready; what I do know came mostly from books I had the curiosity to read outside school

8

JOHN REED

hours. And many fine things I have had to force myself to ex­ plore again because school once spoiled them for me.” In those early years Reed was small for his age and not alto­ gether well, and he could not take an effective part in the games that went on around the school. He had neither the physical equipment nor the temperament for organized sports. But when he could make his own rules, he was a good companion, and he often led his schoolmates in fighting Indians or hunting bears in the woods back of town. The more scope a game gave to his imagination, the better he liked it, and his imagination was auda­ cious. After his first reading of Roman history, he was inspired to give a banquet in the imperial manner. Arranging couches about the table, he invited his friends to recline and eat. The Chinese cook had given place by now to a Negro, and Reed, clapping his hands, called, “Ho, slave, bring on the repast!” Out­ raged, the cook gave notice and left. The summer that he was ten, his mother took him and his brother to the East. The Osbornes had sold their business to the International Harvester Company, and for a time the Reeds had very little money, but C. J. Reed had established himself in the insurance business, and once more they were people of means. Mrs. Reed wanted the boys to know their grandfather and grandmother Reed, and to meet the Jones and Wilmerding cous­ ins. And after the round of visits had been made, she took them to Plymouth for a month at the seashore. They went on to Washington, and were there when the Maine was blown up. Soon Uncle Ray was off for the Philippines, and came back with a fine new story about how he had been made King of Guam. The trip to the East set a date that stood out in the timeless­ ness of childhood memories, but John Reed had another reason for remembering his eleventh year. He had never been very well, and now he began to speak of a severe pain in his left side. The doctor traced the trouble to the kidney, but could find no cure. For the next six years Reed was periodically visited by attacks of the pain, and often he was kept in bed for a week or two at a time. His mother’s friends spoke of him as a delicate child. At school it was generally recognized that he was brilliant but

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

9

likely to be difficult. In the last year of the lower division of the academy he came under Miss Addison Jewell, most illustrious and most feared of its teachers. Piqued by her reputation as a disciplinarian, he refused to study, refused to pay attention, re­ fused to keep order. Knowing that he was the brightest student in the class, she cajoled, commanded, and disciplined, but with no result. One morning Harry, who was deeply concerned by his brother’s behavior, came to school without him. Questioned, he reported that Jack had said to him, “Don’t disturb me; I’m composing a melodrama.” Jack found ways of bothering Miss Jewell: one day, when some point about civics was raised, and he was called upon to recite, he used as illustration his grand­ mother’s smuggling of silks from Japan. Miss Jewell, despairing of overcoming his hostility, had no choice but to give him the low grades he deserved. He took them with indifference. Then one day a visiting authority on education announced to the class that he had a new kind of test, one that actually tested intelli­ gence. Miss Jewell noticed that Jack’s eyes were shining, as he wrote furiously. This was his opportunity for revenge, and he took it. Gradually he found it easier and easier to get on with his fellow-students. He seldom took part in baseball or football, but he excelled in swimming. All summer long he would go to the beach in the Willamette River, swimming farther than any other boy, diving from greater heights, doing tricks they could not do. But what made it easier for him to mingle with his associates was that physical prowess no longer seemed all-important. He and Harry built a theatre in their attic, and there were always a few boys who were willing to come and take part in the plays that Jack composed. He was business manager as well as play­ wright and producer, carefully calculating the profits of the enterprise. The parents of the actors attended, often with their friends. Once a man came who was professionally interested in the theatre, and he suggested that the plays and the actors were amusing enough for public performances. The boys were ex­ cited by the prospect of making a fortune, and their fathers and mothers had trouble in dissuading them. Much of the time Jack did not care whether he had playmates

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JOHN REED

or not. He could always read, and he read everything he could find, from Marie Corelli to Scott, Stevenson, and Sir Thomas Mallory. Reading and writing were occupation enough. From the age of nine he had been determined to be a writer, and he never wanted to be anything else. Nothing interested him so much as the editing of newspapers; at fourteen or fifteen he had theories of publishing, financing, and advertising. He began to write poetry, and to look up to Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood, with whose sons he played, because Wood was a poet. All this, though he seemed to get on well enough with his schoolmates, set him apart from them. “I wasn’t much good at the things other boys were;”- he explained, “and their codes of honor and conduct didn’t hold me. They felt it, too, and had a sort of good-natured contempt for me. I was neither one thing nor the other, neither altogether coward nor brave, neither manly nor sissified, neither ashamed nor unashamed. I think that is why my impression of my boyhood is an unhappy one, and why I have so few close friends in Portland, and why I don’t want ever again to live there.” “I was a good deal of a physical coward,” he wrote, “I would sneak out over the back fence to avoid boys who were ‘laying’ for me or who I thought were ‘laying’ for me. Sometimes I fought, when I couldn’t help myself, and sometimes even won; but I preferred to be called a coward than fight. My imagination conjured up horrible things that would happen to me, and I simply ran away. One time, when I was on the editorial board of the school paper, a boy I was afraid of warned me not to publish a joking paragraph I had written about him—and I didn’t. My way to school lay through a sort of slum district called ‘Goose Hollow,’ peopled with brutal Irish boys, many of whom grew up to be prize-fighters and baseball stars. I was literally frightened out of my senses when I went through Goose Hol­ low. Once a Goose Hollowite made me promise to give him a nickel if he didn’t hit me, and walked up to my house with me while I got it for him. The strange thing was that when I was cornered, and fought, even a licking wasn’t a hundredth time as bad as I thought it would be; but I never learned anything from

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

n

that—the next time I ran away just the same, and suffered the most ghastly pangs of fear.” Often he felt that his mother and father must be ashamed of him. Neither was opposed to his reading and writing, and his mother rather rejoiced in his quietness, but both of them wanted him to be a leader, and his father had only contempt for a cow­ ard. John Reed, more intimate with his parents than were most boys of his generation, was sensitive to their opinions. They rarely coerced him in any way, and the friendliness and grati­ tude that he felt towards them made him eager to justify their hopes. He would have liked to be the self-assured, fearless boy that his father wanted him to be, and the gracious, respected young gentleman that was his mother’s ideal, and it grieved him to fall so far below their expectations.

Almost certainly John Reed exaggerated the disappointment of his parents and the disapproval of his fellows. His mother and father were proud of his achievements, and it was easy—and not far wrong—to attribute his shortcomings to his bad health. His schoolmates noticed, of course, that his tastes were not al­ ways theirs. When Mr. Ladd gathered a group of boys to go hunting, John Reed was not likely to be among them. Colonel Wood’s sons discovered that Jack was happier talking with their father than he was playing football with them. Sometimes when he did join in some game, he would quietly walk off in the very midst of it, and no one could tell whether he was in pain or merely bored. The boys knew that he was different from them, certainly, but they attached less importance to the fact than he suspected. As he grew into his teens, curiosity and high spirits often over­ came timidity. The vivid interest in places and people that was to dominate his life sent him into every comer of the city. Be­ neath the surface of respectable business enterprise, he found that some of the turbulence of frontier days remained. One did not have to go far from Portland to see cow-punchers and pros­ pectors, and there was always the romance of lumbermen in their spiked boots, brakemen walking swaying freight trains, and rangers fighting forest fires. Chinatown still fascinated him,

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JOHN REED

and he loved to lead a crowd of whooping boys through the redlight district. Occasionally his father took him to the ocean, and the blazing sunsets over the Pacific set him to writing verses. Sometimes they went to the mountains, and, hearing the wail of a cougar, he imagined himself back in the pioneering days of his grandfather. The summer that he was fifteen he and four other boys went on a camping trip, and Reed, competing for a prize offered by a local newspaper, wrote an account of the expedition. If one can judge from this, he not only seemed more normal than he thought himself but actually was a good deal like other boys. “On Tuesday, June 24, 190'3,” the essay begins, “five boys, Cliff, Sox, Bates, Pat, and myself, to use their popular names, set out on a camping trip. Cliff had a sailboat, and we had determined to go camping somewhere along the Willamette with the boat to carry our provisions and other equipment. Our parents’ per­ mission having been secured, we embarked on Tuesday morning at half-past nine from Portland. We were a tough-looking crowd, Cliff wearing a soft felt sombrero, a blue cotton shirt with an old bandana knotted around his neck, and old trousers, with a revolver in his hind pocket and a murderous-looking bowie-knife hanging from his cartridge-belt. . . . For equipment we carried a canvas wagon-sheet for a tent, five rolls of blankets, six valises of duds, and provisions enough to last us about a day, with a frying pan, sauce pan, lard can, and three coffee pots, because Cliff, Sox, and Pat drank coffee, Bates cocoa, and I cereal coffee.” The wind died down soon after they started, and they had to take turns paddling with the only oar on board. “This work,” he observed, “soon made us cross and sulky, and when we had eaten our lunch we went in swimming from the boat.” “Much refreshed,” they went on until they came to an island, about twelve miles from Portland and two miles from Oregon City. Here they pitched their camp, which they christened, “with three rousing cheers,” High Five’s Camp. After dinner, they “sat around the camp-fire and sang and told stories until way into the night.” They spent more than a week, exploring the island, shooting

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

13

at rabbits and grouse, swimming, fishing, and sailing on the river. Twice they had to go to Oregon City for provisions. There was one day when “the rain came down like everything,” and they stayed in bed, playing cards, eating cold meals, and trying to keep dry. Two of the boys had to leave the first of the follow­ ing week. On the Wednesday after they left, the other three went sailing. “There was a very high wind, almost like a gale,” Reed wrote, “and we expected any moment to be tipped over. As it was, when I was pulling at the center-board rope, it broke, and I hurt my back against the side of the cock-pit.” The next day his back pained him and he felt sick to his stom­ ach. His mother arrived, a day earlier than she had been ex­ pected, and he was glad to see her. “She said right away that she thought the river water which we drank had made me ill, be­ cause the river was going down, and she said I had to go right home, which I did. . . . And thus ended the memorable outing of the High Five’s Camp. The cost of this expedition, besides of course what we took from our homes, was between $8.50 and Î9” The following autumn Reed entered his last year at Portland Academy. His family had decided that the two final years of college preparation should be spent in the East, and already they were studying the catalogs of the various schools. In the course of the year, apparently as a result of a diet that had been ordered for him, the attacks of pain in his left side ceased, and for the next ten years his kidney gave him no trouble. He felt stronger than he ever had before. The restless energy that drove him for the remainder of his life welled up within him, and, without losing his interest in books and an writing, he began to crave more active forms of expression and a more vigorous part in the life of his contemporaries. But the habits Portland had formed and the attitudes of others towards him could not easily be changed. It was in a different world, among new friends, that John Reed, the leader, fighter, playboy, would be bom. The change would be great, but the influence of the seventeen Portland years would persist. Memory of past cowardice would always encourage recklessness in defying danger. Independence would become his highest ideal because he had known too well

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JOHN REED

the protecting care of a devoted mother. He would demand not merely power but also recognition because for so long he had felt cast out and scorned. His boyhood, however, would shape his manhood positively as well as negatively. He would always be romantic, eager for the unknown, chivalrous and even quixotic. He would always be sensitive, feeling the suffering of others and easy to hurt. That sensitiveness he would try to conceal, succeeding well enough so that many would think him ruthless, but it would endure and be potent in molding his life. With sensitiveness went sympathy. No amount of recognition could make him forget the unhappi­ ness of failure or alter his conviction that success came at the hands of fortune to the very few. He would never be in danger of complacence, nor would egotism harden into callousness. He was potentially a poet. It was not merely that he had romantic dreams and had learned to play with words. There was a kind of singleness in his nature, despite all its many con­ tradictions. Thought, feeling, and action were fused in him. He went from experience to experience, seizing what belonged to him and eventually rejecting all else. Of conscious purpose he had little, but he acted without hesitation, obeying impulse with a loyalty that might temporarily lead him into folly but was nevertheless wise. So, in the winter of 1904, he went about the streets of Port­ land, a nice-looking boy, grown tall now, well-dressed, orderly except for his hair. His face was taking shape, rather long, the upper half of it uncommonly symmetrical: a good broad fore­ head; greenish brown eyes, well set, by turns friendly, curious, and intense, with a little scar, the result of a swimming accident, in the comer of one of them; an even, intelligent nose. Sym­ metry vanished, however, below the nose: the mouth was large and irregular, and the heavy chin did not belong to the rest of the face. But at sixteen, before his cheeks filled out, it was the delicate eyes and forehead one noticed, and the boy seemed singularly handsome. Everybody knew him. The son of C. J. Reed, the famous wit; C. J. Reed, the insurance man who was always talking about Teddy Roosevelt and saying too much about trust-busting for

BOYHOOD IN PORTLAND

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his own good. The son of Margaret Reed, one of Portland’s accomplished hostesses, a favorite at teas and card parties. The grandson of old Mrs. Green, who still gave hilarious dances and was always traveling about the world. Everybody knew him, and knew he was going away to school. Good Portlanders al­ ways sent their children east for their education. All through his last year in Portland, John Reed looked for­ ward to the time when he would be leaving. Not that he disliked the city or was acutely unhappy; but he had a sense that life would begin when he got away from it. In spite of the failures he could not ignore, his adolescent sense of glory to come was strong, and he was impatient for something to happen. After seventeen years of marking time he wanted to march.

n Release J. Reed, who had seen his schoolboy friends go away to college and been unhappy because he could not join • them, was determined not only that his sons should be educated at Harvard but that they should enter college with the prestige that a respectable preparatory school could give. Mor­ ristown, in New Jersey, which he and Mrs. Reed selected, was a school of fifty or sixty students, rather expensive and a little pretentious. Founded under Episcopalian auspices, it had subse­ quently been taken over by three young Harvard men, class of 1888, Butler, Woodman, and Browne. For the most part, only boys from well-to-do families came there, boys with strong opin­ ions about micks and rowdies and high school students. Jack Reed, tense with curiosity and the zeal for achievement, caught at once the atmosphere of the place. “The ordered life of the community interested me,” he afterwards wrote; “I was impressed by its traditional customs and dignities, school patri­ otism, and the sense of a long-settled and established civilization.” He might have been too much impressed. By no means sure of himself with boys of his own age, even in his native Portland, he could easily have withdrawn in solitary consciousness of his in­ feriority to the stolid complacence of eastern breeding. The boys were not uncommonly brilliant in studies or gifted in sports, but they belonged together, and Reed had always hated to be an outsider. What saved him was the seething energy that good health had released. He was so driven to action that he could not stop to distrust himself. The first day of football practice found him 10

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on the field, plunging about with a kind of inept but irresistible fury. The coach laughed at the gawky boy—he was almost six feet tall and weighed only one hundred and thirty-four pounds —but commended him. The other players were too concerned with their own difficulties to pay much attention to the new­ comer. Reed suddenly discovered that he could play football and that he wasn’t afraid of being hurt. Before the first game, he was regularly playing at left guard, and he took part in all seven of the team’s games with other small schools. “Reed, L. G.,” wrote the critic in the Monistonian, “has played for the first time, and has made great progress in knowledge of the game. He is a good tackler, runs well with the ball . . . and ought to make a fast man. He is a little slow in starting, but can easily remedy that fault.” Reed marked the paragraph when he sent the paper home to his mother. The happiness that he felt in the rough physical combat of the game and the recognition that came with his mild success gave John Reed all that he needed to become not merely one of the Morristown boys but a leader. In the compact little life of a small, isolated school, it took him only a few weeks to win the respect, whole-hearted or grudging, of the sixty boys. When a few of them gathered in some one’s room, it was Jack Reed who uttered the boldest, most crushing arguments in the discus­ sions of sex, religion, and politics. It was Jack Reed, too, who could tell the most spectacular stories, building fantasies around the Green chateau, describing raids into forbidden streets, imi­ tating Indian war-whoops and the cries of a wounded cougar. His ingenuity and fearlessness in mischief added to his reputa­ tion. There was nothing particular to do in the village of Morris­ town, a mile or two away, but, because pupils were permitted to go there only on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, he or­ ganized expeditions that left the dormitories, after the retiring hour, by fire escapes and ropes, and returned before dawn in the same clandestine way. More exciting were the secret visits to country dances. There would be the smirking surprise that went around the hall when the three or four boys, whom the dancers immediately identified as aliens from the school, swaggered in,

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and then the supreme audacity of walking up, before resentful eyes, and asking some girl to dance. “His powers as a boy,” one of the three masters remembers, “were turned too much toward mischief and disorder. He was a difficult and rather disturbing influence in the school.” “He was free from ordinary restraints,” says another, “but was amiable and had no serious disciplinary trouble.” There was one time, it is true, when he offended against Morristonian canons of good taste. An entertainment was going on to which only members of the sixth form and their guests were invited. Between the first and second floors of the main building stood a suit of armor, and on its helmet Reed set a chamber pot—in full sight of the women guests. He was put on bounds, lost all privileges, and was de­ prived of his room in the Harvard dormitory and given an al­ cove in the Columbia dormitory under the charge of the teacher he liked least. Football and mischief were all very well, but Reed could never be happy long unless he was writing. The school had a monthly magazine, the Morristonian, to which he immediately contributed. He wanted nothing less, however, than a magazine of his own. The school had once had a comic paper, suppressed because its humor was too personal. Reed revived it, a thm little paper, published twice a month, the Rooster. It avoided person­ alities well enough to survive the year, but that was its principal achievement. Twelve issues of dismal schoolboy humor were enough, and the paper was not continued the next year. It had served its purpose as a vehicle for John Reed’s urgent need not so much to create as to organize. Creation, such as it was, found outlet in the Morristonian. His first contribution was a labored piece of exaggeration, a type of humor to which for more than a decade he frequently recurred. His other two stories were purely romantic, one of them the story of the destruction of Atlantis. His verse, no more original than could have been expected, tried to say what was going on within him, that private life of surging hope, vague desire, occa­ sional despair, that persisted underneath the agitated public life of schoolboy activity. He strove to be literary in describing a storm and ended:

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An atom in this world of might and night I stand alone. He wrote of a violin:

Sobbing through the still night places, Like a little child a-weeping, Singing happily, and laughing, Laughter like the bells of silver Which are rung in Paradise. Then it dies away and leaves us Something wanting in the night.

The year went by. He spoke on behalf of Alton B. Parker in a mock election campaign. His mother visited the school. He went home with a classmate, Frank Damrosch, for Thanksgiving Day. In the spring he was elected to the board of the Morristonian, made vice-president of the athletic association, chosen man­ ager of the football team. He won the Scribner prize for the best historical thesis. He began to call on girls in the town and to think of himself as a “fusser.” “Busy, happy, with lots of friends I expanded into self-confidence. Without trying I found myself; and since then I have never been very much afraid of men.” When he returned to Portland, he found his father entering upon his duties as United States Marshal. The appointment had come in a strange way. Several years earlier, Ethan Hitchcock, Secretary of the Interior, had come to suspect the existence of land frauds in the West. A preliminary investigation by William J. Bums showed that the*public land in Washington, Oregon, and California was being seized by lumber companies and rail­ road interests. To be granted a section of public land, a claimant swore that he had occupied the land for five years and had im­ proved it. A ring of politicians, with the aid of government offi­ cials, including the Commissioner of the Land Office himself, had systematically falsified the records and taken the land. Lumber interests, railroads, and insurance companies were all involved. Francis J. Heney, who had fought graft in Arizona, was made special prosecutor. When he went to Portland, he called on C. J.

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JOHN REED

Reed, whom he had known in the Bohemian Club in San Fran­ cisco. Mr. Reed, with a kind of good-natured cynicism, took him around the city, introducing him to the leading men and letting him learn what he could from their gossip. Heney soon realized that the lumber companies controlled the land office, the senators and representatives, and even the federal judges. Al­ though his first cases were against men and women with criminal records, respectable citizens of Portland came to him and tact­ fully suggested that conviction would be unwise. The frauds affected the politics and business of the entire state, and Heney saw that he would have to fight the good men as well as the bad. One of the principal obstacles to Heney’s success was Jack Matthews, United States Marshal and Republican boss of Port­ land. Matthews, in impaneling juries and in whatever other ways were possible, obstructed Heney’s course. Heney appealed to Roosevelt, and Matthews was ousted. When Heney asked C. J. Reed to take his place, Reed could scarcely believe he was seri­ ous, but Heney argued, and Reed caught fire. He had always been shocked by the calm predacity of his associates, but he had been satisfied to make the discrepancies between pretense and practice the butt of his wit. Now cynicism vanished, and he be­ came a crusader. It was a new experience to John Reed to find his father so full of conviction and passion, and he responded to the air of excite­ ment that swept through the house. He loved to go to the office and see his father poking fun at William J. Bums’ solemn hawkshaw manners or talking strategy with Frank Heney. C. J.’s en­ thusiasm entered the boy, who began to talk hotly of busting trusts and jailing grafters. But the impression that lasted longest was of his father’s fearlessness, for there was actual physical dan­ ger in this crusade and there was the intense pressure of respect­ able opinion. The Arlington Club elected a new president, and some of its members would not speak to the man they had so often applauded. As the prosecution went on, reaching a United States Senator, touching the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Southern, leading to the death in New York of the president of an insurance company, Portland saw Frank Heney as an enemy

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of society and C. J. Reed as a traitor. And all the time the man grew bolder, stronger in his convictions, sharper in his wit. John Reed went back to Morristown with a new admiration and a new friendship for his father, and with even greater confi­ dence in himself. He had been chosen to the committee of seven, a harmless concession to the theory of student democracy. He was manager of the football team as well as a player. The boys called him Rooster and Farmer, the first because of the now defunct paper, the second because of his gangling body, his round, unfirm face, and his unkempt hair. The masters found him more troublesome than ever, for defiance of discipline had become instinctive. For two months he was removed from the school committee, and later he was made to resign from the edi­ torial board of the Morristonian. The latter action brought an indignant, self-righteous petition from Reed and Damrosch, his fellow-offender, and they were restored to the board. His own experience and his admiration for his father strength­ ened his belief that concessions were wrong, that he must always do exactly what he wanted and say exactly what he thought. He would win recognition, but only on his own terms. He began to associate with an older boy in his class, a southerner who subsequently flunked out. Reed liked the boy because he was so completely honest, and he made up his mind to emulate his candor. They went to New York together for a weekend, fabricating some sort of excuse. Tm going to get a girl,” his friend said, and he did, and brought her to his room and slept with her. Reed, though not quite ready to emulate him, admired his audacity. And when tjiey were coming home, crossing on the ferry to take the Morristown train, the boy said, “I feel good. I feel like singing.” So he sang, sitting on the rail, paying no atten­ tion to the passengers who gaped at him. Candor, audacity, unself-consciousness—Reed placed them at the top of his hierarchy of virtues. Candor and audacity he could cultivate and the appearance of un-self-consciousness, but he was too complex a person to be en­ tirely free from awareness of what other people were thinking about him. He became, instead, something of an actor, casting himself in roles that he admired. And all the time he led an in­

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JOHN REED

tense emotional life that he revealed to no one except insofar as he clumsily hinted at it in his poetry. The growth of strong sex­ ual impulses fostered his romanticism, and each girl that inter­ ested him was a Guinevere or an Elaine. Though he craved every form of eminence, he was at heart convinced that he was to be a great poet, for he thought of himself, in spite of all his activity, as a dreamer. There was a strange experience one Sat­ urday afternoon, when, in the midst of a game, he looked up and for a moment believed he saw a vision of Galahad and the Holy Grail. He remained the romantic boy whose early years had been so much a matter of solitary dreaming. His new confi­ dence in himself was expressed in warm-hearted sociability and constant action, but he continued to dream. He did not know how to convey the intensity of his feelings, even if he had been willing to attempt it. He was prolific, how­ ever, in his writing. He liked the spectacular; one of his stories in the Morristonian, “The End of the World,” closes with New York City falling into a pit and the prophet from the desert, who had announced the disaster, leaping in after it. Of his verses none has more than personal significance, and only two or three have that. There is a poem called “Twilight” that suggests a nostalgia for the West:

That wind has stirred the mighty pines That cling along Mt. Shasta’s side Has hurled the broad Pacific surf Against the rocks of Tillamook; And o’er the snow-fields of Mt. Hood Has caught the bitter cold and roared Across the prairies, piling high The huge white drifts of swirling snow. And yet, although the bitter wind Bites deep into my shrinking flesh, I seem to see against the sky The mountains of the white cascades; And grandly through the mighty range The vast Columbia flowed down Unto the sea forevermore.

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There is also a rather extraordinary poem to Tennyson:

Singer of the kingly Arthur, Deathless song which cannot die. To thy truth I’d fall a martyr, Truth from lips that will not lie. Give to me thine inspiration, Let thy soul my soul immerse Till through sweetest meditation I can sing my soul in verse. He was not very different from other prep school boys. Like most pre-college students who have any literary inclinations at all, he wrote in imitation of the author he had most recently read and was capable of the most naive enthusiasms. He was be­ low the average as a scholar, and he barely passed his entrance examinations to Harvard. In athletics he was only fairly good, though he won his letter two years in football and one year in track. He made the masters miserable with his tricks, but he was neither an incorrigibly bad boy nor a thoughtful rebel. Yet Reed is remembered by the masters of Morristown School and by the boys who were there with him, more than thirty years ago. A tremendous explosive energy was released on that stodgy little campus, and, though it accomplished nothing, it left its mark. Reed made himself felt as a force. And he succeeded, even then, in dividing his associates into two camps, those who loved him and those who hated him. Thirty years later two men who were in the class below Reed’s wrote about him. “He seemed to delight,” said one of them, “in showing his authority over the new boys. I happened to be a new boy and I suppose that may have prejudiced me.” “At that time there was a certain amount of hazing in the school,” said the other, “and I remem­ ber Jack particularly because he was especially friendly to me as a new boy and refused to take part in any of the hazing ac­ tivities.” Whether he bullied the new boys or not, they did not forget him.

Ill

“Pain

of

Growing, Ecstasy

of

Unfolding”

September, 1906, John Reed entered Harvard. Harvard, Cambridge, Boston were romantic names to the boy from Oregon. There was the Yard, open and spacious, laid out with elm-shaded paths. There were the old halls, built a century and more ago, Massachusetts, Harvard, Hollis, Stoughton. There was Bulfinch’s administration building, University Hall. There were Sever and Emerson, where classes met. There were Gore Hall and the squat-spired, incongruous little chapel. This was the Yard, the old, the essential Harvard. To the north were mu­ seums, the gymnasium, the law and divinity schools; to the south, one block away, on Mt. Auburn Street, the private dormi­ tories, the Gold Coast. This, Reed confidently believed, was to be the scene of his new triumphs. In his good-natured, casual way he was ambitious, wanted the best that Harvard offered, and could see no reason why he should not have it. After the conquest of Morristown, the conquest of Harvard seemed inevitable. There was nothing, certainly, that he was afraid to try. A day or two after college opened, he walked up to Bob Hallowell. “I hear that you draw,” he said. “Why don’t we do a book about Harvard? I’ll do the text and you do the pictures.” “But,” Hallowell objected, “we don’t know anything about the place.” “Hell,” Reed replied, “we’ll find out doing the thing!” It was only one of thousands of ideas that momentarily swept Reed off his feet and then came to nothing. If, however, he had set out to discover what kind of institution it was in which he n

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planned to spend four years, he might have understood why its conquest was not going to be easy and why, to the end, his vic­ tory would be equivocal. Harvard was the oldest, largest, richest, and by general con­ sent the greatest university in the United States. The man who had presided over it during its rise to greatness was Charles W. Eliot, who was seventy-two when Reed entered college and who retired before he graduated. During the forty years that he was president Harvard changed from a provincial college with barely a thousand students to an internationally famous univer­ sity with a faculty of more than five hundred, an undergraduate body of more than two thousand, and a graduate enrollment in its half-dozen professional schools of sixteen hundred. Its en­ dowment increased from two million to twenty-two, and its annual expenses from a quarter of a million to two million and a half. Charles W. Eliot was not a minister, and to that extent his appointment in 1869 was revolutionary. He was a chemist. But he was also a Boston Eliot. His paternal grandfather, a merchant, was probably the richest man in Boston when he died in 1820. His mother’s father had made a considerable fortune in the northwestern fur and East India trades, a fortune augmented by investment in the infant textile industry. His father, thus en­ dowed, had devoted himself to public service, first as Mayor of Boston and Congressman from Massachusetts, then as philan­ thropist. The family fortune was materially diminished by dis­ astrous investment in 1857, but the family position was never threatened. At a time when his academic future seemed dubious, Eliot seriously considered becoming superintendent of the Mer­ rimack Company’s textile mills. There were always opportunities for an Eliot. Eliot was a democrat and a liberal. He spoke cordially to gar­ bage collectors and brusquely to ambassadors. He never con­ sciously bowed down before wealth, and he honestly believed that America was a land of opportunity. He criticized trade unionism because it restricted individual freedom; a scab might, he said, be a hero. He favored segregation for Negroes, but he desired equal treatment, in their separate compartments, for black

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and white. The processes of colonial expansion should be hu­ mane and educational. He was carefully fair-minded, graciously tolerant, and he preserved intact the prejudices of his Beacon Street birthplace. President Eliot brought to Cambridge some of the finest minds in America. There were James, Royce, Santayana, and Palmer in philosophy; Münsterberg in psychology; Kittredge, Neilson, Wendell, and Baker in English; Channing and Hart in history; Taussig in economics. Since the undergraduate, once he had passed the required freshman course in English and had satisfied the authorities that he had a reading knowledge of French and German, was free to take' any courses that suited his fancy, he could, if he chose and if other considerations such as convenient hours and reputations for leniency did not weigh too heavily with him, listen to men who had no superiors in America. John Reed could have learned all this; indeed, in a vague way he knew it already. He knew what Eliot stood for, and he ap­ proved. The liberalism of Charles W. Eliot was the creed in which C. J. Reed had been raised, though at the moment he was engaged in belligerent enforcement rather than abstract affirma­ tion of middle-class rights. John Reed would not even have ob­ jected to the fact that the Corporation, the governing body of Harvard University, was dominated by Henry Lee Higginson, Boston’s leading financier and patron of the arts. It was only the predatory business men, the malefactors of great wealth, as C. J. Reed’s new idol called them, that the Reeds condemned. They believed in business itself, in competition, in capitalism. In fact, the way in which the university was run must have seemed so natural and so unimportant to John Reed that, if he had written about Harvard, he would not have bothered to mention it. He was impressed when Eliot told the class of 1910 that the purpose of the university “is to allow each man to think and do as he pleases, and the tendency is to allow this more and more.” And when Eliot asked the freshmen if they were afraid of this liberty, Reed could have answered with a ringing “No!” That was all that really concerned him: he was free to think and do as he pleased, and he did not care to whom he owed the privilege.

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Much more interesting to him than the official administration of the university was the world of the college undergraduates. So far as John Reed was concerned, the great men Eliot had brought to Harvard and the millions of dollars he had added to its endowment were simply a background for the exploits of some two thousand young men like himself. What he did not realize, in those early days when he made his audacious proposal to Hallowell, was that the undergraduate world was quite as complicated as the world of academic officialdom, and just as alien from anything he had ever known. He saw scores of op­ portunity for achievement: the various sports, the managerships of the various sports, the magazines, and all the clubs. He did not see that Harvard had its own ways of judging fitness for the prizes of its little world. Morristown had taught him more about class distinctions and social hierarchies than he had known in Portland, but it had also convinced him that they were only of secondary importance. Harvard was to teach him how important they could be.

As soon as his first ebullience had died away, he found that he was extraordinarily lonely. “In 1906,” he afterwards wrote, “I went up to Harvard almost alone, knowing hardly a soul in the university. My college class entered over seven hundred strong, and for the first three months it seemed to me, going around to lectures and meetings, as if every one of the seven hundred had friends but me. I was thrilled with the immensity of Harvard, its infinite opportunities, its august history and traditions—but des­ perately lonely.” * Without much thought, he elected Latin, English literature, elementary French and German, history, and philosophy. There was nothing in the insipid routine of freshman courses to arouse his imagination, and he quickly learned how little work was necessary to win a passing grade. In the classrooms he made ac­ quaintances, and perhaps walked with them across the Yard, but they never asked him to their rooms, and, indeed, they scarcely recognized him if he met them at some undergraduate gathering. So many of the men seemed to have been together at one of the larger preparatory schools, St. Mark’s or Groton or

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Exeter or Andover. They knew each other, and they knew upper-classmen, whose familiarity with college traditions they soon absorbed. And they found Reed’s impetuous cordiality a little embarrassing. If this man was some one they wanted to know, they would soon enough find out; meanwhile he would do well not to thrust himself forward. Loneliness would have driven Reed to engage in as many undergraduate activities as possible, even if ambition had not pushed him on. He had to show these fellows. Football, crew, managerial positions, the magazines—he went out for them all. He was not good enough for the freshman football team, though he now weighed twenty pounds more than he had at Morris­ town, and he was soon eliminated. Disappointed, he began to spend more of his time in writing for the magazines. The Lampoon, he was excited to discover, accepted his jokes. He was not aware that they were as inane as the jokes he had written in abundance for the Rooster; he only rejoiced that they found favor with the exacting, if not precisely discriminating, young editors. Success with the Lampoon was important to him because the magazine represented the essential Harvard, the Harvard of the chosen few. It belonged to and defended the complacent, self-assured, superior Harvard that vaguely dis­ tressed John Reed and yet of which he wanted to be a part. If his inventiveness did not carry him beyond the classroom ex­ ploits of a student called “Mr. Grinda,” his work was acceptable and was, indeed, on a level with most of the jokes that, stupid as they individually were, made the Lampoon a bulwark of the Harvardian status quo. His work also proved acceptable to the editors of the Harvard Monthly, which represented a different Harvard tradition, the tradition of serious literary effort. Hermann Hagedorn was editor-in-chief Reed’s freshman year, and John Hall Wheelock and Lucien Price were on the board. George Santayana, Edwin Ar­ lington Robinson, M. A. DeWolfe Howe, and William Vaughn Moody had written for the Monthly in the past. The Monthly affirmed nothing except the right of undergraduates to be as mature as they could be. It offered no formal opposition, at least in 1906, to the prejudices of the Lampoon, but its values were not

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the Lampoon's values. It summoned from John Reed the best prose he had thus far written—a short, romantic, poetic story called “Bacchanal”—and the best poetry, a sonnet, “Guinevere.” The fact that he wrote with equal enthusiasm and success for both the Lampoon and the Monthly indicates the inner confu­ sion that made Reed unhappy in his first year at Harvard. Wiser men were content with what they could have, and Reed could have a literary career. He wanted that, but he wanted more too; he wanted popularity, acclaim, the glittering prizes that Harvard offered. He thought longingly of his triumphs at Morristown, and despaired because he could not immediately duplicate them at Harvard. In the spring he made a valiant try for a position on the fresh­ man crew, staying in Cambridge through the vacation to work at a rowing machine in the empty boathouse. And when he was dropped from the list of candidates, he entered the competition for the assistant managership of the varsity crew, working day and night to collect subscriptions. When the appointed date came, it was found that Reed had easily won, but the manager said that Reed was not the right sort of man, and he extended the competition, permitting Raymond Belmont to go to New York and get his father, a Morgan man, to help him. Belmont was given the position. Reed experienced other kinds of discrimination. One of the social leaders of the class promised to room with him sophomore year, and then, warned that Reed was not quite sound, drew away from him. And Reed became snobbish himself: “I, too, hurt a boy who was my friend.” The boy was a New York Jew, “a shy, rather melancholy person,” Reed called him, but a boy with a brilliant mind. Reed liked him and learned much from him. But he began to reflect: “We were always together, we two outsiders. I became irritated and morbid about it—it seemed I would never be part of the rich splendor of college life with him around—so I drew away from him. It hurt him very much, and it taught me better.”

It was a rather troubled, distrustful boy who returned to Ore­ gon in June. But C. J. Reed, who had himself learned something

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about snobbishness, told him to keep on fighting. And, it became clear the next fall, the defeats were less serious than they had seemed. He was elected an editor of the Monthly, and, in Feb­ ruary, of the Lampoon. His old audacity, which even in his de­ spair he had maintained as a pose, returned in full ebullience. At the Monthly's initiation ceremony, when each of the prospec­ tive editors was required to recite an original poem, Reed sud­ denly gave voice to a parody of one of the sea poems John Hall Wheelock, now editor-in-chief, had written: Long have I longed about Longacre Square For the sound of the. sea and the loud yellow plunk Of the breakers beating against the moonlight And the desolate horizoned spaces.

O voiceless, murmurous sea, Full of salt water and the great sad crabs. ...

Wheelock interrupted, and Reed’s election was unanimously confirmed. It was perhaps a greater audacity that led Reed’s fellow neophyte and friend, Edward Hunt, to read, on such an occasion, a serious and moving poem on death; but that was a kind of audacity John Reed had yet to learn. Of course there were still defeats. Not satisfied with being on two of the magazines, Reed joined the competition for the staff of the Crimson, the college daily. Though even then he was a good journalist, he was not elected. Such defeats did not come because he was socially ineligible. He did not belong to one of the best Boston families, nor had he attended St. Mark’s or Gro­ ton, but he did have behind him some money, a reputable ances­ try, and two years at an expensive preparatory school. With his ability, which nobody doubted, he was precisely the sort of per­ son that the aristocracy would have been glad to adopt, as two years later, it adopted his brother Harry, who knew how to play the Harvard game. But there was something in Jack that the social leaders feared. He wanted to be accepted, but it had to be on his own terms, and his terms simply were not theirs. Much as he longed to conform, he could not do it. He remained, in spite of himself, defiant, belligerent, mocking. When good man-

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nets would have counted most, his manners were the worst he could contrive. In dealing with contributors to the Lampoon and the Monthly he was rude to men of influence and considerate to nonentities. There were times when it seemed to the more sober men of his class, men who went their own ways indifferent to the aristocrats, that he was bootlicking. There were times, per­ haps, when he would have been willing to lick boots; but he did not know how. It was no wonder that he was not elected to any of the clubs with social prestige. The complicated club system of Harvard remains a mystery to thousands of undergraduates, who spend their four years in satisfied unawareness of it, except when, at various periods, the men chosen to the Institute go running through the Yard in gray pants and blue shirts. Reed, however, knew every detail of the club system and described it: “In soph­ omore year, the Institute of 1770 selects one hundred men from the class, presumably fit social material, who thereafter regard themselves as the socially elect. The waiting clubs, which are final to one another (that is to say, a man can belong only to one waiting club) elect a few more, and further refine the original hundred. This group of what is supposed to be the best men in the class composes the material with which the final clubs fill their ranks in junior and senior years.” It is a complicated system for the achievement of a simple ob­ ject. The majority of final club members are men whose families have always controlled Harvard. These men as undergraduates dominate, under ordinary circumstances, college activities. After they graduate, they supply the university with directors of the Alumni Association, Overseers, and members of the Corporation. They admit outsiders to their ranks, but only such outsiders as they are sure they can assimilate. John Reed, not being assimilable, remained outside. Even the literary clubs, after his success in the magazines, blackballed him. It probably would have done him no harm if he had been taken into the clubs, for, once the prizes had been won, he would have seen how trivial they were. Nevertheless, as he remarked, “the effect of the system on its own members is deadly,” and it per­ haps was as well that he was not exposed.

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He remained outside the Harvard of the clubs, and thus he was forced to discover another Harvard, the Harvard that was undergoing what he later, with pardonable exaggeration, called a renaissance. He himself dated the renaissance from an essay that Lee Simonson, a hitherto obscure member of the class of 1909, published in the Advocate for January, 1908. “I am an outsider,” Simonson said, “as that term is understood in college. ... The particular problems of college activity so often discussed in these columns are not vital for me.” He was concerned with “the tepidity, the inertia, the listlessness of our life here.” “The idea of gentility,” he said, “soothes us like a warm blanket . . . For us, life (spelled with a capital) is neither very serious nor very urgent. . . . The virtues here are the contented, unassertive virtues of middle-age, tact and deference, easy comradeship and slipshod kindliness. . . . But there is no effective sign here of the boisterous virtues of youth, of those for whom life is tense with secret surprises—revolutions, rejuvenations and catastrophes.” Simonson did not speak for himself alone, and within four months after his article appeared three new clubs had been formed that made some attempt to foster and to express the boisterous virtues. With two of these, the Cosmopolitan Club and the Dramatic Club, Reed became closely associated. The Cosmopolitan Club, the direct outgrowth of President Eliot’s liberalism, was a semi-official attempt to facilitate the interna­ tional exchange of ideas. It might have been almost purely for­ mal, but, responding to the new insurgency, it encouraged con­ troversy, and debated executions in Spain, syndicalism in France, revolution in China. The Dramatic Club, an indirect product of Baker’s course in playwriting, presented original plays by grad­ uates or undergraduates. In its choice of plays and its methods of production it aimed at maturity, intelligence, and vitality. “It should be a club,” Simonson said in an article in the Monthly, “primarily for the playwright, the enthusiast, the theorist.” The third of the new organizations, the Socialist Club, Reed did not belong to, though in his senior year he occasionally at­ tended its meetings. Its stated purpose was “the study of Social­ ism and all other radical programs of reform which aim at a better organic development of society.” Walter Lippmann joined

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it, became its president, gave it influence and prestige in the life of the college. Harvard had always believed in philanthropy, and there were committees, to one of which T. S. Eliot be­ longed, for the distribution of clothing to the poor. (“We are very systematic about dispensing our shabby clothes,” Simon­ son had written.) But the Socialist Club made fun of charity. It had social legislation introduced into the Massachusetts legis­ lature; it attacked the university for not paying its servants living wages; it led to the formation of a league for woman suffrage, a single tax club, an anarchist group; it petitioned the faculty for a course in Socialism. “All this,” Reed later wrote, “made no ostensible difference in the look of Harvard society, and prob­ ably the club-men and the athletes, who represented us to the world, never even heard of it. But it made me, and many others, realize that there was something going on in the dull outside world more thrilling than college activities, and turned our at­ tention to the writings of men like H. G. Wells and Graham Wallas, wrenching us away from the Oscar Wildian dilettantism which had possessed undergraduate litterateurs for generations.” Although he did not as an undergraduate sufficiently recog­ nize the importance of the Socialist Club to want to join it, and though his whole appreciation of the “renaissance” really came after graduation, he did feel, when he returned for his junior year in the fall of 1908, that he was part of something more im­ portant than the unimaginative, narrow, showy life of the wait­ ing and final clubs. He became assistant manager of the Dramatic Club, which staged as its first play Allan Davis’ The Promised Land. Under the direction of Hans von Kaltenborn, the mana­ ger, Reed solicited advertisements for the program, raised funds from patrons and patronesses, sent publicity to the press, wor­ ried about properties and scenery, and bulldozed the cast into attending rehearsals. It was hard work, but the glamor of first nights was sufficient reward. He was too sure of himself now to care much about the aristocrats, though lack of recognition occasionally made him uneasy. He joined and later became president of the Western Club, an informal organization resulting from the realization that men from the West were slow in making friends at Har­

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vard. It was an eating club, and Reed presided at meals, making personal jokes, as his father had done at the Arlington Club in Portland, and apostrophizing each arrival at the table. Once, when Walter Lippmann came to the club as a guest, Reed leaped to his feet, made a sweeping bow, and cried, “Gentlemen, the future President of the United States.” But sometimes his humor was on a lower level: once he threw a handful of beans and said, “Where have you been?” In fact, a good deal of raucous horseplay went on at the Western Club, in more or less con­ scious defiance of the Harvard that prided itself on having out­ grown schoolboy tricks. There were practical jokes, sometimes of a painful sort, and there were burlesque operas, such as “The Girl of the Golden Toothbrush,” of which Reed wrote the words and Joe Adams the music. Now that he was no longer troubled by failure, he was full of an energy that neither his courses nor his undergraduate duties could exhaust. “Let’s find some excitement,” was his characteristic phrase. He was involved more than once with the Boston police, and he occasionally picked a fight with Cam­ bridge loafers, who were given to jeering at Harvard boys. He could find amusement even in a graveyard: one Sunday after­ noon, when he and Alan Gregg were walking in Mt. Auburn cemetery, Reed took out his calling cards, wrote on a dozen or more, “Sorry you weren’t in when we called,” and left them at the tombs with the most illustrious Boston names. And one mid­ night he led a group of his classmates through Lexington, shout­ ing, “The British are coming.” In the spring of his junior year he and Joe Adams and W. T. Pickering went together to New York. Adams, a delicate, small, fair-haired boy from Mason City, Iowa, was one of Reed’s closest friends. Though Adams was completely conservative and they never agreed, they were constantly together. Both had become friendly with Pickering during several weekends that they spent with him in a log cabin in Sharon to which he had access. In the city they devoted three or four days to attending the theatre and drinking at the Harvard Club bar. Reed took them down to Morristown, where he led the students in singing school and college songs, and pointed out the scenes of his erst­

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while glory. But five days of vacation remained, and there seemed to be no excitement left in New York. They decided to go to Bermuda. They had money enough, they estimated, but there were no boats that would bring them back in time for the beginning of classes. Pickering, a senior and therefore faced with the possible loss of his degree, refused to go, in spite of violent abuse, and Reed and Adams left without him. Their financial calculations had, not surprisingly, underestimated their capacities, and they found themselves desperately short of cash. Reed wrote out all the poems he had contributed to the Monthly, and succeeded in selling them to a newspaper. Adams raised his share by play­ ing the piano in a resort of dubious reputation. They caught the boat and got back to Cambridge. The authori­ ties could not overlook a tardy return from vacation, especially when it resulted from such an escapade, and they revived a form of punishment that had been common in the nineteenth century, rustication: Reed and Adams were sent to Concord for the re­ mainder of the term. Absence from Cambridge in the spring was not wholly unpleasant, and Reed found time, while supposedly pursuing his studies under the direction of a terrified school­ master, to make the acquaintance of Concord’s more interesting citizens. He also found time to send to the Western Club a daily bulletin in the form of a Sunday school lesson. Number seven, for example, bore the “golden text for the day”: “Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound save his own smashings,” which was attributed to Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.” The bulletin read: “Last night Mason City açd the Oregon rolled around a good deal in a hunt for the elusive moth miller. In the scrimmage two windows were broken, one electric light globe, and the lid to the slop jar. A large moth was severely injured about the neck and ears. Two old ladies who room below us and are Seventh Day Adventists thought that Christ had come again, and prayed violently all night. The hotel cat was so horrified by the unex­ pected tumult that the next morning she was found to have given birth to a litter of pups in the cash register.” There was only one of his classes that Reed would have re­ gretted during his rustication, and that was English 12, Charles

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Townsend Copeland’s course in composition. During his first two years at Harvard Reed had found occasional stimulus in the classroom, but he had not met any teacher who deeply affected him. There had, it is true, been one chance meeting that he always remembered. During his lonely days as a freshman he had found himself standing beside an elderly man in front of a bookstore window. They fell into conversation about the books exhibited, especially the works of O. Henry, which both ad­ mired. The man invited him home to dinner, and they talked until midnight of Harvard, undergraduate clubs, how to become popular, and comic operas. As Reed left, his host asked his name, and, being told, gave his bwn: William James. But that was a single, casual contact. Copeland became not merely a teacher but also a friend. The little man, with his absurd dignity, his amusing poses, his pretended ferocity, and his ironic courtesy, did most of his teaching in his room in Hollis Hall, for he was too wise to suppose that the art of writing could be adequately treated in classroom lectures. He taught his students what he knew about writing in generous private con­ ferences, and he taught them what he knew about life in friendly talks in the evening. On Saturday evenings students were always welcome, and sometimes there was a famous writer or actor to talk to them, though Copey was attraction enough. Precisely what he did for his students no one has ever managed to say, though dozens of his famous pupils have publicly paid tribute to him. “He has stimulated generations of men,” Reed wrote, “to find color and strength and beauty in books and in the world, and to express it again.” Copey gave of himself, refusing to set up a barrier against his students in order to preserve time for productive scholarship. And out of his friendship came a deep sense of the power and importance of the written word. Copeland selected the students who could take English 12, and at first he did not want Reed, for he had heard that he was contentious and troublesome. But Reed begged and begged to be allowed to enter the course, promising to be well-behaved, and at last he was admitted. Copey soon knew that the boy had something like genius, and did all that he could to bring it to fruition. Reed was profoundly grateful. He liked the little man, liked him be­

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cause he was human and made no attempt to conceal human weaknesses, because he was a superb showman and knew how to dramatize himself, because he was such an affront to academic tradition and had been punished by being kept an instructor while diligent nonentities rose to professorial rank. They be­ came friends, and Reed went in and out of Hollis 15 as he would have gone in and out of the room of a classmate. He ran errands for Copey and accompanied him when he went away to give one of his famous readings. He told him his troubles and his ambitions. On a Saturday evening only a swimming meet could keep Reed away from Hollis 15. He liked the room with its walls solidly lined with books, the fireplace, the autographed pictures, and Copey sitting in an armchair under the single light, smoking and talking. He liked the crowd, the boys sitting close-packed on the floor, athletes, scholars, aristocrats, radicals, editors, and the obscure, the unknown. He liked the talk: “Everybody talks of the thing nearest his heart; everybody finds himself alert, quick, almost brilliant.” This was romance, drama, greatness, fife. “There are two men,” Reed wrote in 1917, “who give me confidence in myself, who make me want to work, and to do nothing unworthy.” One of them was Copeland. Copey gave him confidence in himself, for Copey knew that, whatever aristocratic opinion might hold, John Reed was des­ tined to success. And towards the end of his junior year Reed found some confirmation of Copey’s trust in him. He was elected Ibis of the Lampoon, which meant that he was second in com­ mand. It was true that, traditionally, the outstanding artist was chosen Ibis and the outstanding writer was made president. In reversing the order, making Hallowell president, the board was expressing a certain residuum of its old attitude towards Reed. But Reed, in his friendship for Hallowell, could not resent the slight, and he was satisfied with his share of the power and the glory. He liked the work on the Lampoon. The magazine has always had a glamor for undergraduates, though many of its editors have grown up, as Reed did, to become a little ashamed of it. He worried about each issue, spent nights at the printers, deliberated solemnly over the selection of bad jokes and fair

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cartoons, wrote and re-wrote the editorials, battled with his col­ leagues, and sent copies, with his contributions carefully marked, to his mother and father. The Monthly, though he knew even then that it was more important, was less exciting, perhaps because it was less his. Edward Hunt had become editor-in-chief, and Reed, who would have liked the position and was a logical candidate for it, was not displeased. He respected Hunt, for he had come to Cam­ bridge penniless and with a mother and two sisters to support, and had found time not only to organize a stenographic bureau and do other work to meet his and their needs, but also to be­ come an honor student, president of the Dramatic Club, and the most praised of the Monthly's poets. And there were others on the staff whom Reed respected: Walter Lippmann, whose clear logic he vaguely distrusted and yet admired, and Alan Seeger, whose irritating aloofness from mankind and painful, rapturous devotion to beauty made him seem to Reed the perfect romantic poet. Nothing was more satisfying than to get an issue of the Lampoon safely on the press, but a meeting of the Monthly board was a foretaste of manhood. By the end of his junior year Reed held responsible positions on two magazines, was manager of the music clubs, was vicepresident and president-to-be of the Cosmopolitan Club, and was captain of the water polo team. In swimming he had found his one opportunity to win athletic distinction, and especially in water polo. It was a brutal game, and Reed loved it. Since the only rule was that a man could not be tackled unless he was within four feet of the ball, there was opportunity for the rough­ est type of combat. Men sometimes were held under water so long that they had to be pulled out and resuscitated, and mem­ bers of the team were often sick for a day or two after a game. The absence of rules and the purely physical conflict delighted Reed, and the fact that the game was played in the water per­ fected his pleasure. This minor sport, soon to be abolished at Harvard, gave him joy, if not honor.

At the end of Reed’s junior year President Eliot retired, and the next autumn Abbott Lawrence Lowell was inducted into

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office. He was descended from Francis Cabot Lowell, who had founded the textile industry in New England. His father and both his grandfathers were successful manufacturers. Lowell had practiced law for seventeen years and then taught govern­ ment at Harvard. No bettej man could have been found to con­ solidate the gains that Eliot had made. A pure New Englander, member of a family that could boast of greatness in literature and in business, he knew how to cement the alliance between culture and industry. Lowell immediately sought to curb the “anarchistic spirit,” as Reed called it, that Eliot had fostered. Atomic individualism, Lowell perceived, had served its purpose, and now, if business was to achieve an era of stability and order, there must be trained, responsible leadership. Under Eliot, according to John Reed, Harvard was not “a brooder for masses of mediocrelyeducated young men equipped with ‘business’ psychology; out of each class came a few creative minds, a few scholars, a few ‘gentlemen’ with insolent manners, and a ruck of nobodies.” That was precisely what Lowell wanted to change; he wanted to give to each of Harvard’s thousands of students a measure of culture and to impose certain minimum standards of civic behavior. He moved against the individualism of the Eliot era by modi­ fying the elective system and by putting all the freshmen into one set of dormitories. Reed disapproved. He liked the Harvard in which “men could live pretty much where they pleased, and do as they pleased,” and “there was no attempt made by the authorities to weld the student body together, or to enforce any kind of uniformity.” He* believed that whatever he owed to Harvard was the result of the freedom that was now to be abridged, and he attacked Lowell’s plans in Lampoon editorials. Yet Reed became in a sense an instrument of the new policy of conformity. Harvard had never excluded sports from its theory of indifference. Some men took an ardent interest in the teams; others paid no attention to them; either attitude was per­ missible. But in the fall of 1909 there was talk about school spirit; pressure was exerted to bring men to pre-football game mass-meetings; the importance of cheering, which had always

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been slightly desultory, was preached. And John Reed, being eligible as the captain of a team, was appointed song-leader. He knew and resented the ridiculousness of college sentiment, but he could not resist “the supremely blissful sensation of swaying two thousand voices in great crashing choruses.” He wrote a football song called “Score,” with music by Joe Adams, in which he proposed to “twist the bull-dog’s tale” and to “call up the hearse for dear old Yale.” With Hamilton Fish, Jr., leading the team, Reed pranced before the stands, the most inspired song-leader Harvard had known. In practice meetings, Robert Hallowell wrote, “he would stand up alone before a few thou­ sand undergraduates and demonstrate without a quiver of selfconsciousness just how a cheer should be given. If he didn’t like the way his instructions were followed, he cursed at the crowd, he bullied it, sneered at it. But he always captured it.” Of course he knew he was being absurd, and once, when he saw a girl he liked in the stands and she was laughing at him, he threw down his megaphone and walked off the field. Usually, he did not care; power and drama combined were enough to make him forget himself, A. Lawrence Lowell, the aristocrats, and even girls. Cheer-leading was the most exciting activity of the autumn, but not the only one. The clubs and the magazines demanded plenty of time, and, as the football season was ending, rehearsals began in earnest for the production of Percy MacKaye’s The Scarecrow. Though Reed was only on the business staff, he took a strong interest in the play, and he and Kenneth MacGowan, Robert Edmond Jones, and Sam Eliot often went to MacKaye’s home to talk with the author. There they usually met Percy MacKaye’s brother, James, who was giving a series of lectures at Harvard bn the politics of utility, and the discussions were as likely to be political as literary. Indeed, these gatherings at MacKaye’s were evidence of the alliance between politics and literature that was the foundation of the renaissance. The same men were active in the Monthly, the Dramatic Club, and the Socialist Club, and the same impulses dominated the three or­ ganizations. Reed was equally glad to talk with Percy MacKaye about the role of drama and pageantry in awakening a new civic consciousness and with James MacKaye about the psychological

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causes of political action. Walter Lippmann was more directly affected than Reed by James MacKaye’s utilitarianism, but Reed began to catch glimpses of realms of ideas he had not known. It is difficult, of course, not to feel that Reed would have been happier if he had been satisfied with the magazines and the Dramatic Club, with the world of ideas and literary expression. But he could not help craving political and social position in the college. Since he did want eminence in undergraduate affairs, it is, in view of his deep-rooted distaste for the aristocrats and the rebelliousness that later became so strong in him, rather strange that he was not a leader in the opposition party that developed in his class. From the fall of its freshman year, the class of 1910 was divided. What began as a kind of private feud of a student named Bob Brown against the aristocrats grew into a fight between the Yard and the Street. The Street was Mt. Auburn Street, where the richer men lived in private dormi­ tories, leaving the relatively poor, relatively inconspicuous stu­ dents to occupy the college dormitories in the Yard. Under Brown’s somewhat demagogic leadership, the unrepresented majority rose against the traditionally dominant minority. Reed’s sympathies should have been and perhaps were with the Yard, though he lived on the Street. During his first three years, without being committed to the Brown faction, he gave it some support; but he made no attempt to use his talents in leading it. He did not want to identify himself with the out­ siders. And when, in his senior year, the insiders, the aristocrats, gave him a modicum of recognition, he embraced their cause. The nominating committee, after some hesitation, offered his name and G. W. Martin’s for ivy orator. Both were the Street’s candidates, and the Yard, nominating Frank W. Sullivan by petition, elected him. Reed was defeated in company with Ham­ ilton Fish, Jr., the aristocrats’ candidate for first marshal, and a half dozen of the class’s choicest snobs. Reed could justify himself, as others did, by insisting that Brown had resorted to the tactics of a ward politician, but the clearer thinking men in the class, without deceiving themselves about Brown, supported what they knew to be essentially a democratic revolt. Reed not only turned his back on the demo­

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cratic cause; he developed a hot-tempered indignation against his successful opponents. On Lampoon stationery he scratched down a parody of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Neither witty nor wise, it disclosed a bitterness that, once he understood the triviality of the whole affair and the wrongness of his own position, he was ashamed of. The last stanza read:

“Charge the Committee then!” Three hundred stalwart men, Traitors to Nineteen Ten Broke the class spirit, while All thç world wondered. Swayed by false argument, Urged to the polls they went, Scoundrels and ignorant, Worthy three hundred!

The defeat by the rank and file was followed by another grudging recognition from the aristocracy. The Hasty Pudding Club, though its most conspicuous function was the annual pro­ duction of a musical comedy, selected its members not for their ability as writers, composers, or actors but for their social dis­ tinction. As a result, it found itself in the spring of 1910 without a member qualified to write lyrics for the forthcoming produc­ tion. Reed’s verses in the Lampoon gave clear enough indication of his talent, and, without enthusiasm, the club offered him membership. Though he knew well enough why he was chosen, he was delighted with the chance to do the lyrics, and he felt some pride and considerable malicious satisfaction in the honor bestowed upon him. Reed’s fellow-victim of the Yard avalanche, George Martin, had already written the book, and Walter S. Langshaw was composing the music. Martin’s father, Edward S. Martin, long editor of Life, had known and rather liked C. J. Reed in Auburn, New York. Young Martin did not dislike Jack Reed, but he did not like him; he thought him brilliant but unsafe; the trouble, he felt, was that he did not know the difference between cricket and not-cricket; there was no telling what he might do. They made somewhat unfortunate collaborators, especially since

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Martin could not help realizing that Reed should have written the entire libretto. What Reed did was to take full advantage of the few oppor­ tunities for satire that Martin’s book provided. They were not many, for Diana's Debut, as Martin had conceived it, poked only the politest kind of fun at Boston society. Reed’s most popular song, still sung at class reunions, was exceedingly simple: At the Somerset Things were rather wet, Big exclusive affair— From the lack of heat All of Beacon Street Surely must have been there. Slightly more pointed is the song in which one of the characters gives advice on the achievement of social distinction:

Just insist that your aunt was a Cabot, And your grandmother’s real name was Weld. Try hard to make rudeness a habit, And be careful with whom you’re beheld. Be familiar with Ibsen and Wendell And learn to be lazy with grace; But if you are driven to work, why Lee Higginson’s really the place. It was not the first time that Reed had expressed his impa­ tience with Back Bay society. In a Lampoon editorial he had written: “The selection of a properly qualified father and mother is an operation which demands a tact and finesse seldom possessed by children so young. . . . Hyphens are of immense value—remember that anyone will always be glad to lend money to an Endicott-Sears-Cabot, a Wendell-Wendell, or a Trum­ bull-Peabody. ... If the child is too late to corral a Back Bay Brahman for a progenitor, let him seize upon a self-made man who has made a good job of it. Money will finally land any one among the Captains of Society.”

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Mild enough, it is true, but unconventional for a Harvard man, especially a Harvard man who was Ibis on the Lampoon and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club. Reed, even as a senior, had no clear convictions about the aristocrats in the col­ lege and their relatives in the Back Bay. At first he envied them, but he refused either to imitate or to cultivate them. He had brought letters from Portland to a certain number of Boston’s finest families, but, after his first dinner party, he tore them up in disgust. When he was invited to Back Bay dances or dinners, perversity drove him to behave as badly as possible. His room­ mates his senior year, Car] Chadwick and Francis Davis, were constantly receiving invitations to social affairs, and sometimes Reed felt a little sorry for himself because he was so consistently left out. If, however, one of them had taken him to visit some society leader of the town, he would have started—and wom­ an argument on anarchism or free love. He knew that it would please his mother if he made the right kind of friends, and he was himself made a little uneasy by the insolent indifference and open hostility of persons of power and prestige; but he could not curry favor, and he remained defiant. Defiance was not a principle with him; it was an instinct. He could detect snobbishness and pretense with unerring accuracy, and could affront them with unfailing precision. His seething energy, his love of excitement, his joy in making himself con­ spicuous, all blended with honesty and courage, made him a terror to the complacent. It was pure love of excitement that led him and Jack Kelley, when they became bored during a week at Nantucket, to steal a boat and sail it to the mainland. It was mere playfulness that encouraged him to attend spiritualist meetings and build up quietly from one serious question to another until finally he had exposed the medium to ridicule. But he could go after bigger game and go after it in all seriousness. Professor Schofield had revived an old club, the Symposium, and tried to turn it into a gentlemanly affair with beautifully served stand-up suppers. Reed and other members very quickly converted polite discourse into serious and sometimes violent discussion. The climax came when Schofield, to let the boys meet a successful business man, invited President Mellen of the

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New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, to speak. Mel­ len began with a baby-talk description of the locomotive as it was when he was a boy and how it had grown. Reed interrupted, and began a series of questions about the financing of the New Haven. Armed with facts land deadly earnest, Reed, backed by Alan Seeger and one or two others, pounded at Mellen until he writhed. William Roscoe Thayer, who was present, tried to restore the discussion to the level of fatuous gentility, but his efforts merely made Reed more savage, and he pushed relent­ lessly on until Mellen collapsed in silence. It was a defense of the principles of C. J. Reed, but, more important, it was a vic­ tory over the pompousness and hypocrisy that Jack Reed hated. Reed liked the Cosmopolitan Club because it made room for both seriousness and horseplay. To meet the men of twenty nations seemed to him a significant part of his education. To prefer their company to the company of the men of the Institute was a sound gesture of defiance. To find opportunities for lead­ ership and excuses for merrymaking was a joy. He wrote and staged a play, called “Tit for Tat,” built around the legend of the Tower of Babel. He organized an international track meet. He taught the members songs. He and Wheeler Sammons, the secretary, gave a demonstration of hypnotism, in the course of which Reed climbed in a professorial lap and played with dis­ tinguished whiskers. But at the annual banquet he presided with dignity, ceremoniously introduced the speakers, Melville E. Stone and Prince Selim Senudah among them, and said with feeling that the presidency of the club was the highest honor that had been bestowed opt him at Harvard. The Cosmopolitan Club banquet was one of the events that marked the end of John Reed’s college career. He and Hallowell had, with relief and regret, turned over the Lampoon to Gluyas Williams and Alan Gregg. The Monthly was in new hands. All the managerships and captaincies, all the presidential and vicepresidential duties had been surrendered. Only commemorative exercises remained. The Monthly held a dinner, to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, at which Santayana, MacKaye, Baker, and others spoke, and Reed read a poem. There was a farewell class party. The Hasty Pudding Club held its “strawberry

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night,” presenting a one-act play, “The Last of the Pirates,” which Reed had written, with music by W. B. Barker, and with Hanford MacNider in the cast. Very proud of their son’s achievement, Mr. and Mrs. Reed came east for his graduation. He was pleased to be able to intro­ duce his father to certain classmates who, he knew, would appreciate his wit and courage. The prosecution of the lumber thieves had ended with an unusual number of convictions, and for the moment the public land was safe. C. J. Reed had offended the Taft administration, and he knew that, since it could no longer be argued by Heney and other friends that he was needed for a special purpose, he was certain to be ousted from the mar­ shalship. He did not particularly care, for the position held no interest aside from the attack on the lumber trusts. What he now wanted to do was to carry on the battle of Roosevelt progres­ sivism on other fronts, and he was planning to run for Congress. Since he had so frankly expressed his opinion of the regular Republicans, even to the extent of literally throwing the local boss out of his office, he had no chance but to make his cam­ paign as an avowed insurgent. Friends in Portland believed that his chances were excellent, but they were distressed at his leav­ ing just when the struggle for nomination was getting under way. He insisted, however, that he was going to see his son graduate, no matter what it cost. Both Jack and his father were in high spirits and happy in each other’s company. Class Day was on June 24. Edward Hunt recited the class poem, and T. S. Eliot’s ode was sung. In the stadium Reed had to listen to F. W. Sullivan’s ivy oration, consoling himself, per­ haps, with the thought that he could have done better. His own part in the ceremonies was purely informal. There was a mo­ ment when the class was gathered together, and he leaped upon a table and began to speak. The speech was a tribute to Bob Hallowell. Reed grew eloquent, but seriousness did not last long. Clarence Little, crawling beneath the table, lifted it on his back and toppled the speaker over. One thing saddened commencement week. A Negro in the class had been seriously ill. Not many classmates knew him, for only the hardest labor had got him through college, but Reed,

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always sensitive to the handicaps of men of other races, knew and liked him. Now, in the boy’s illness, Reed was one of two or three who found time to nurse him. And, as it became appar­ ent that the Negro could not live, Reed felt the tragedy of effort and self-denial that had been cheated of their reward.

John Reed had been graduated from Harvard College. He had won no academic distinction, and certainly he would have regarded his courses as almost the least important elements in his education. Not that he had disliked his studies: Copey’s course had been a pleasure and satisfaction; William Allan Neil­ son had helped him to discover Chaucer; Baker’s course in the Elizabethan drama had fed his old love of plays and play­ writing. He had learned a little bit about art, music, and philoso­ phy. Deliberately choosing a purely literary education, without a single course in either physical or social science, he had also deliberately chosen from his courses in literature the men and the books that interested him. He could write an acceptable paper on the novel of terror or the drama after 1642, because he found something that he wanted to talk about, but he had none of the diligence in dull details that brings good grades. He did not care about the grades, and he got what he wanted. Most of what he wanted had to be got outside the classroom. Early in his college years Reed tried to formulate the philosophy that guided his conduct at Harvard. He divided students into three groups: the athletes, the scholars, and the activity men. The first he dismissed, not perhaps without envy, as life­ less, purposeless machines. JThe second he condemned as narrow. The third he described as “the realest expression of what Har­ vard means today.” “They are dreamers and often poets,” he said, and he spoke of Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Edward Sheldon as activity men. John Reed, twice an editor, captain of a minor sport, manager of the musical clubs, president of the Cosmopolitan Club, vice-president of the Dramatic Club, a leader in the Western Club, writer of lyrics for Hasty Pud­ ding, member of Oracle, Round Table, and Symposium, was an activity man. And all these activities seemed to him exciting and important. He was flattered by every office and eager in the

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performance of each new set of duties. He was an activity man partly because he deeply craved recognition and power, but chiefly because he had to be active. He was also a literary man. It would be foolish to pretend that he was a distinguished writer as an undergraduate. He was not one of the rare individuals—perhaps less rare at Harvard than elsewhere—on whom a precocious brilliance descends mid­ way in college, so that their undergraduate work is not less mature than whatever they do in the next ten years. Lee Simon­ son was rather like that, bringing out of aloofness a sophistica­ tion that dazzled his classmates. And Walter Lippmann, sud­ denly emerging from three years of silence, became a lawgiver; “a Manhattan Zeus,” Edward Hunt called him, “steady, mas­ sive, impassive, hurling his thunderbolts judiciously among the herds of humankind.” Even Alan Seeger, who also came star­ tlingly out of obscurity, was no more juvenile as a Harvard senior than as the embattled poet of France, and had the same facility. Other men, too, though less amazingly developed, were nearer manhood than Reed: Van Wyck Brooks, who had been an editor of the Monthly when Reed first wrote for it; Kenneth MacGowan, who was one of his successors; Conrad Aiken, who wrote for the Advocate. Reed was closer to the college norm. His ambitions had no bounds; he wrote one-act plays, short stories, innumerable poems, and occasional essays; he planned a novel and a fulllength play. His best prose was in the poetic and imaginative short stories of the type he had written at Morristown. When, as in “The Red Hand” and “In England’s Need,” he sought to combine fantasy and satire or fantasy and realism, he was purely sophomoric, but the romanticism of “The Pharaoh,” the inven­ tiveness of “The Singing Gates,” and the allegorical unity of “The Winged Stone” are not unimpressive. His one serious attempt at realism, a description of a trip with friends in Oregon, smothers in poetic verbiage a sound feeling for the mountains and the sea. As for his poetry, it was no more commonplace than most of the poetry in the Harvard magazines, than T. S. Eliot’s, for ex­ ample, and considerably less conventional. The sonnet, “Tchai-

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kowsky,” which was reprinted in the anthology with which the Monthly celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, compares well enough with the poems in the volume by men with distinguished names. “The Desert” and “Coyote Song,” which he chose to preserve in Tamburlainey suggest the two principal influences on his work: Swinburne and the esthetes, Kipling and the poets of action. “A Winter Run,” which is rather in the Kipling vein, has the merit of deriving some fine poetic imagery from actual Cambridge experience. Of the more literary poems, “Melisande” is probably the least banal. Reed had the sensibility of a poet, but he was not dedicated to poetry in the way that Alan Seeger was. He loved power and the exercise of his executive ability quite as much as he loved poetry. Moreover, he was so eager for experience that he could not be bothered to assimilate it. He never lacked things to say, but he was likely to choose an easy way of saying them. And the influences on his poetry—for any undergraduate poet is bound to be influenced—were not healthy. It was a pity that he should be imitative, but doubly a pity that he should imitate poets who were also imitators. Real poets were in the making, but either they had not appeared or were not known. Fortunately there were three men who could say to John Reed things that needed to be said. There was Copey, who said again and again that writing was important because life was im­ portant, and who never let a man forget that he had eyes. There was Lincoln Steffens, not yet a close friend of Reed’s but a friend of his father’s and of Walter Lippmann’s. Steffens could tell him that there was noj the great chasm between journalism and poetry that he imagined: “It’s all a matter of expression, which is journalism, and which may be literature—if the writer is striving not to make a work of art, but simply to tell his story for you and me and the man on the street.” And there was his old friend in Portland, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, who took the trouble to write the Harvard senior a long letter about poetry. Wood could tell him that poetry must be made new: “The poetry of the future must not be a re-vamping of the past, no matter how beautiful it may be in form. Whitman, who sac­ rificed form and is full of excrescences, comes nearer being the

JOHN REED 5° American genius, nearer being a new man than all of them.” And Wood could tell him, too, that poetry could not live with­ out the spirit of revolution: “The poetry of the future must not be a moral essay nor an economic tract, but it positively must have the pulsing thought of the modern man. If it be full of the surge of the ocean and the wet south wind of an ever-recurring spring, it must also be full of the surge of human lifeblood and wet with the tears of humanity.” Thinking of these things, Reed left Harvard. As at Morris­ town he had made bitter enemies, who would talk for twentyfive years of his “showmanship and craving for notoriety,” and call him “a grandstand player, utterly selfish, a publicity seeker, basically unsound on fundamentals of religion, government, and society in general.” “His death,” they would say, “was the only piece of good fortune he contributed to the United States,” or, more mildly, “I always thought he was a most offensive man.” He also had made friends, who believed in and admired him as strongly as his enemies condemned him. As at Morristown he had learned self-confidence, but now it was a confidence that had triumphed over discrimination, disappointment, and defeat. Harvard had done him some good and much less harm than it does most of its graduates. It had not robbed him of his energy and hope, had not diminished his courage, had not made him ashamed of either his gayety or his seriousness. Most important of all, it had not closed him up, shut him away from life. He was only beginning to grow.

IV

To See

the

World

on the morning of July 9, 1910, the S.S. Bostonian left Boston with seven hundred steers on board. X X Copey had given his invariable advice: do something, see the world, have experience, find something to write about. And John Reed had listened and obeyed. He planned to work his way not only to Europe but around the world. His father ap­ proved the plan, though he insisted on modifying it by drawing heavily on sparse resources and giving the boy, despite his pro­ tests, one hundred dollars and a letter of credit. Reed had persuaded Waldo Peirce to accompany him. Peirce was a Maine man who had revolted against the close-figuring caution that had made his grandfather a power in Bangor. His more than two hundred pounds of solid strength had inevitably put him on the football team, though he disliked the long after­ noons of dreary practice. He disliked anything that partook of the nature of discipline. He could not be bothered to work at drawing, though his cartoons in the Lampoon had more origi­ nality than the sleek pictures of its cleverest artists. He could not be bothered to work at writing, though one or two realistic stories in the Monthly had exposed the empty imitativeness of the ruck of undergraduate tales. He could not be bothered to work at his courses, and the university had more than once penalized him. Towards the aristocrats, who had to accept him, he felt the careless indifference that Reed wanted to feel and couldn’t quite. Reed said he admired Peirce because he wore the kind of clothes he wanted to wear. He also admired him because he was one man who was more daring, more irresponsible, more adventurous than John Reed. at eleven-thirty

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Peirce planned to go to Paris to study painting, but he planned to go in the comfort of the Mauretania, Reed wanted him on the cattle boat, and, though he failed to get definite consent, gave his name to the officer when he himself signed up for the voyage. On the morning of departure Peirce wept with Reed to the dock to explain that his name had been given by mistake and that he was not going. But Reed pleaded with him so eloquently that he at last agreed to let chance settle the dispute; he would go to the bank for money and, if the boat was there when he returned, he would sail with her. Though the boat should have departed at once, and though he spent as much time at the bank as decency would permit, he lost the'bet. It was an uncommonly hot day, and the stench of the cattle filled the forecastle and hung heavy on the deck. Even out in the harbor the fierce heat was unrelieved. Peirce began to think of a girl he had wanted to see, of messages he should have sent his family, of the luxury of the Mauretania. He told Reed he had half a mind to slip overboard and swim back. Reed said it was ridiculous. But would it be all right with him, Peirce asked. “Certainly not,” said Reed. The dozen college students gathered on the deck and signed the ship’s articles. Then each was given a tin plate, tin cup, and spoon, and they went below to eat. There was boiled meat and some sort of vegetable soup with white worms in it. Peirce went up on deck. The water looked singularly cool and pleasant. He went back to the forecastle and laid his watch and wallet on Reed’s bed. On deck he looked carefully around. The men were still below, and the captain was out of sight on the bridge. He dove overboard. The water was as pleasant as he had expected. He slipped off most of his clothes, and swam slowly away from the vessel, try­ ing hard to keep out of sight. His one concern was that he had signed the ship’s articles. He was committed to ten days or more on board that stinking ship, and he was convinced that, if the captain saw him, he would turn about and capture him. Reed might tell the captain. He watched the ship, but it moved stead­ ily away from him. Swimming a few miles in water as calm as the Dunster House pool was pure pleasure on such a day. Be-

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sides, there were plenty of fishermen’s boats within hail, too near indeed for comfort, since, he was almost ready to believe, one of them might pick him up and pursue the Bostonian and perhaps claim a reward for the return of a fugitive cattleman. At last, when the Bostonian v^as almost out of sight, he called out to a pair of startled lobster fishermen, who took him aboard. They left him at one of the islands in the harbor, where he bor­ rowed a pair of pants and a shirt from a soldier. Back in Boston, he hurried to Cambridge and told the story to his friends. On board the Bostonian no one, except John Reed, paid any attention to Peirce’s absence, and even Reed, though he sus­ pected the truth, thought he might be asleep in the hay. But next morning the captain mustered all hands and discovered that Peirce was gone. Reed told his story and produced Peirce’s wal­ let and watch. The captain expressed some skepticism, and the crew was convinced that Peirce had been murdered. Reed main­ tained that Peirce would meet him at Liverpool. “God help you,” said the captain, “if he doesn’t.” But Reed was confident, and the threat of a hearing before the Board of Inquiry in Manchester did not disturb him. There was enough to worry him. The food was bad and the sleeping quar­ ters unbearable. Reed wanted experience but not in so intensive a form. The college men got together, and discussed ways of making themselves more comfortable than the common bull­ pushers. With a few bribes, they arranged for better food, and got permission to put up a tarpaulin tent on deck. Most of them were Harvard and Yale men, and they excluded two “middlewestern muckers from the University of Illinois” from their “university club.” * Reed and a man named Walker got themselves appointed night-watchmen. They had to look after the steers from eight­ thirty to four in the morning, when they turned out all hands to feed the cattle. In the afternoon, when they awoke, they helped haul up the hay. As night-watchmen they were entitled to an extra meal, and when tips and small favors had awakened the second steward to a proper appreciation of the consideration due college boys on catde ships, even Reed’s appetite was sated. He made friends with the dry, quick-witted chief engineer, who

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gave the university club the privilege of turning on the salt water pumps every afternoon and taking sea-baths on deck. As the men on board grew to like him, they became con­ cerned over his fate. There were three Irishmen who begged him to slip overboard when the ship was nearest to the coast of Ireland. If he would go to Cork, they said, they would meet him and take care of him. But he laughed and declared that Peirce would be at the dock. They reached Liverpool, and the tug came out. Reed looked everywhere for Peirce, but he did not come, though the Mauretania had been in for two days. The captain and mate frowned. Finally the mate slipped on a pair of leg-irons and locked him in-a little cabin. The ship moved slowly up the canal to Manchester. Peirce, in the meantime, had taken the Mauretania and had arrived in Liverpool. There had been some talk in Cambridge of his swimming out to meet the ship and pretending he had fol­ lowed it all the way over. But the thought of the ship’s articles dispelled any humorous plans. His imagination played with the various forms of punishment an offended captain could employ. At Liverpool he kept out of sight and made inquiries. He wanted to see Reed alone; once he caught a glimpse of him, but he was talking with the captain. Peirce fled and went to a lawyer, who scoffed at his fears. As the Bostonian made dreary progress through the locks, John Reed lay awake and worried, not so much because of what might happen to him as because of what, he was now convinced, had happened to Peirce. He wished he had never asked Peirce to go with him, wished he had taken his suggestion seriously and dis­ suaded him, wished he had told the captain as soon as his sus­ picions stirred. When, preceded by the captain, flanked by two British bobbies, followed by the mates, the steward, the cook, the crew, and the cattlemen, he marched to the Board of Trade building, he was almost willing to believe that he was a murderer. Before eleven stolid Britishers, with the officers and men of the Bostonian filling the room, Reed began his testimony. Peirce, fortified by legal advice, walked in. Reed called his name, and, unperturbed in the tumultuous room, Peirce identified himself. The captain rose: “Do you remember,” he shouted, “that you

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signed the vessel’s articles and that you are liable for breaking your contract.” But Peirce had been well instructed. “Yes,” he said, “but you are liable for criminal negligence. I was seasick. I went aft to lean over the rail. I slipped, I cried for help, I fell overboard. You yourself were on the bridge at the time and paid no atten­ tion to me.” When it had been established that the captain was on the bridge, the chairman, after some reflections on Peirce’s sanity, ordered Reed released and Peirce’s property returned to him. The only punishment came when, as he left the Bostonian with his watch, his wallet, and his bags, the sailors and cattlemen lined up to express their opinion of him. Several of them shook hands with Reed and advised him to get rid of his partner as quickly as possible.

As a matter of fact, they did separate immediately, though with plans to meet in London. Reed had set his mind on a walking trip through England, and Peirce was not interested. Reed went first to Chester, and at the Duke of Westminster’s estate he saw “a pageant so beautiful it fairly made you ache.” Equipped with rough clothes and stout shoes, he started off through the Welsh mountains. “And still,” he wrote his brother, “the example of American pluck, democracy, and independence pursues his way through these devastated reaches.” He split his little toe, and had to stay over for a day and a night in a little village, where “the people came from miles around to see the fool American who walked when he could ride.” He went on and the next night found himself with sore feet a long way from the nearest town. He saw an old Tudor mansion, and near the stables there was a haystack. He crawled in, took off his shoes, and lit a cigarette. Before he could finish it, a liv­ eried servant appeared and cursed at him for smoking in the hay. “Whose house is that?” Reed asked. “Mrs. Vanderbilt’s.” “Not Mrs. Alfred Vanderbilt’s?” “Yes, sir—why, sir—”

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“But surely she doesn’t mind my sleeping in the hay?” “No, sir, I don’t suppose so—gentleman-like, sir.” Reed continued to rub his feet with Elliman’s embrocation. “Will that be all, sir?” asked the servant. “Yes, for the present. But see,” and he jingled coins in his pocket, “if you can’t get me a bucket of water, soap, and a towel in the morning; and call me at seven-thirty.” “Yes, sir; be careful of the hay, sir.” “That will be all.” “Good night, sir.” Reed slept well, and was awakened by a respectful touch at seven-thirty. After he had Washed, he gave the servant sixpence and his card. “Present this,” he said, “with my compliments to Mrs. Vanderbilt, and say that I am very sorry not to have seen her.” And he went on, to Shrewsbury, to the Royal Oak, and, tak­ ing a train to avoid Birmingham, into Worcester. At Stratford he stayed at the Harvard House, saw a performance of Josephine Preston Peabody’s The Piper, and contrived to see Shakespeare’s tomb on Sunday by entering with the church-goers and avoid­ ing the beadle. He rented a bicycle and went to Kenilworth, where he invaded the estate by the Duke of Leicester’s private gate, and where, finding Mervyn’s Tower closed, he broke into it. He went to a village festival at Chipping-Norton, and thought the men and women “lots cleaner and happier than our farming and village people.” On his way to Oxford he stopped at Woodstock and stole a swim in the Duke of Marlboro’s private pool. Finally he reached London and met Peirce. A creditable pro­ portion of his hundred dollars had survived the walking trip, but in London he began to draw on the letter of credit. He bought not only a heavy suit and a light tweed suit, but also a cutaway, a dress suit, and a tuxedo. He saw most of the sights, but he failed to meet Wells and Chesterton, as he had hoped to do. Liking London and having sold two or three articles to the London Daily News, he contemplated remaining in England, but Peirce was eager for Paris, and at the end of August they walked to Canterbury, attended service in the cathedral, and went on to Dover. No ordinary method of crossing the channel

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would suit Reed. He proposed that they smuggle themselves across on a fishing boat, but Peirce would have nothing of it, and in the end Reed had to be satisfied with the rather tame ex­ ploit of stowing away on the Calais boat. Of course they were caught, and there was nothing for them to do but lamely tell the purser that they had found a friend on board and now could pay their fares. Peirce was irritated and at Calais he suggested that they separate. Reed walked alone down the coast towards Paris. In Paris he met Carl Chadwick and Joe Adams. After dressing in tuxedoes, with canes, gloves, and all appropriate finery, they had dinner at the Café de la Paix and went the rounds of Mont­ martre, ending at Maxim’s at four o’clock. From Maxim’s they drove to Grez, where Chadwick’s family lived. There were brothers and sisters and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, and they all “did something,” painted pictures or wrote poetry or composed music. Reed was delighted. He was delighted, too, with the freedom he found. Chadwick drove him and Adams to the Norman coast at St. Pierre, where he knew three or four French girls. “You can’t imagine the free­ dom of young girls in France,” Reed wrote his father. “They go without a chaperon everywhere, even on long eight-day trips in the auto; everybody turns in at the same hotel, or we all sleep together in a haystack by the roadside. Everybody makes jokes about the most delicate subjects, and everybody roars with laughter.” The three young men took two of the girls to Havre for the aviation meet, had dinner on the porch of the casino, played petits chevaux, and got back to St. Pierre at two in the morning, “when we all went into the ocean without anything on, the girls on one side of the beach and we on the other.” They found Peirce at Grez on their return, and Reed, Peirce, Adams, Chadwick, and Alden Brooks, Chadwick’s brother-inlaw, motored to San Sebastian to see a bullfight. Reed tried to be tough-minded about the fight. “The bull tosses the horse, at the same time goring him, so that his guts hang out. Then they flog the horse to his feet again, and make him fight with his bowels hanging out.” Bullfights, after all, were experience. But what really excited him was Spain. They had all planned a walk­

5s

JOHN REED

ing-trip, but the others were lazy or had things to do in Paris or had been unfortunate at San Sebastian’« gambling tables, and Reed, without knowing a word of Spanish, started off alone. He bought a peasant’s corduroys and, with his camera over his shoulders, marched through the green fields and along the lively rivers of the country of the Basques. That night he watched the dancers in the plaza of Tolosa and listened to the music of a band of blue-bloused peasants. In the third-class coach —“the last survival of the Inquisition,” he called it—of the train to Burgos, he was the object of argumentative curiosity and lav­ ish hospitality. In Burgos he followed a solemn procession to high mass in the cathedral, and saw a witch hunt. On the way to Valladolid he made the acquaintance of a sailor who could say “godam.” The sailor happened to be lousy, and the keeper of the inn he chose tried to charge Reed, at the sailor’s suggestion, double the normal amount for lodging for the two. But he bought Reed a beer and saw him to the train. Changing trains at Medina del Campo, where a royal visitor was expected, he was arrested on suspicion of being an anarchist. Once he had satisfied the authorities, he wanted to stay in the warm examination room, but he was sent back to the bare, un­ heated station. Salamanca delighted him and roused him to spec­ ulation on religion and art. En route to Toledo, again third-class, he was once more pointed at and questioned, but this time, when it emerged that he was a North American, he was attacked, to the delight of everyone in the car, by a biting, scratching wom­ an who had had a son killed in ninety-eight. Two days of To­ ledo—“the most wonderful of Spanish cities, more regal than Madrid, more gloriously disdainful than Burgos”—were not enough: he wanted weeks to study the cathedral, look at the El Grecos, wander in the streets. But he went on to Madrid, where he slept for two nights in the park under a borrowed blanket, spent a day at the Prado, and looked in vain for the exotic glamor Carmen had taught him to expect. The third-class ticket for Paris took the last of the money he had with him.

In Paris Reed began to take stock. He began to question a little the wisdom of trying to go around the world, though he was

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still willing to make a try if he could find anyone to go with him. The dash into Spain, glad as he was that he had made it, had taught him a lesson: “It’s no fun,” he wrote his brother, “to bum your way alone in this beast of a continent, because if you haven’t anybody to laugh with, there isn’t a hell of a lot of hu­ mor in it.” Paris would suit him for the fall and early winter, and then perhaps a trip through Italy, Greece, Austria, and Ger­ many. He would return home in the spring. He took a room at the Hotel des Deux Anges and covered the walls with posters. Sleeping late, he usually met Waldo Peirce at a café for breakfast. In the afternoon he tried to write or worked on his French. In the evening he and Peirce and anyone they happened to meet wandered around Montmartre or dropped in at the Bal Bullier. He was occasionally invited to polite dances, and Professor Schofield, who was exchange professor at the Sor­ bonne and sought to become the mentor of all Harvard youths in France, had him for dinner and lectured him on his behavior. His behavior invited rebukes, though he was quick to resent them. He and Peirce competed in the invention of new ways of shocking the American colony. They broke into respectable parties dressed in bizarre clothes. They welcomed brawls in cheap cafés. They not only frequented low resorts, but boasted of their exploits, adjusting the degree of exaggeration to the hor­ ror of the listener. “This is the greatest place in the world,” he wrote his family and his friends. It was a great place because it was free. “You never imagined such utter freedom,” he informed Alan Gregg. “Freedom from every boundary, moral, religious, social.” Reed wanted freedom for its own sake and because in freedom lay romance. In college he had avoided, in large degree and perhaps completely, the kind of sexual exploits that undergraduates with a little money were likely to engage in. In Paris he thought he was not buying a woman; he was taking a mistress. One night it occurred to him that he must bring her flowers. He bought a cabful, and he and his friends went to the girl’s room and heaped them over her on her bed. This was romance. But there was a night when she stroked his hair and said, “Tell me; how do you make your money?” Throwing on his clothes, he ran down­

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JOHN REED

stairs, and walked and walked until the bad taste was out of his mouth. His education continued. He was very glad that he had gone to Harvard, and, when he discovered that most of the Harvard men in Paris had belonged to the Hasty Pudding, he was inclined to forget the way in which he had been taken into the club. Harvard was a good deal in his thoughts. He cabled congratu­ lations to Copey when he was made an assistant professor. He proposed to Waldo Peirce that they take a tramp steamer back to America and turn up on the eve of the Yale game. “It would be,” he said, with an appreciation of his own legend that Copey could not have bettered, “such a characteristic thing for us to do.” He laid bets with the Yale men in Paris on the outcome of the game, went to the annual Harvard dinner, and was down­ hearted when the news came that the best Lothrop Withington’s team could achieve was a tie. He was affectionately concerned about the Lampoon, pleaded with Alan Gregg to send him copies, and wrote detailed criticisms of the issues he saw. He even wrote a serial for the Lampoon, describing the mythical adventures of Dean Hurlbut and Regent Stearns in Paris. Harvard, four months after graduation, was still the most im­ portant thing in John Reed’s life. “You hear lots of graduates telling how small things are at college, now that they are out,” he wrote Gregg. “That makes me foam at the mouth, because college always looms tremendous to me. The foolishnesses I did there smart just as much, the good things have more of a glamor than ever.” There are two ways, he went on, of taking college: “one as a school, where nothing really counts but what applies materially to your after success—or that it is a separate life. I took the latter and I’m not sorry.” Now, he felt, he was begin­ ning something new, which had no continuity with college, and for which college had been a preparation only insofar as it had given him a chance to find himself through victory and defeat. But he sometimes wondered whether he had found himself or not. He had been so absorbed in college life that he had seldom considered what lay outside the bounds of Harvard. Four months in Europe had shown him so much that Harvard had not prepared him for that he was a little frightened. “The first

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effect of being over here,” he told Gregg, “is a pretty full real­ ization of all you have ever dreamed of. This is followed by a sort of top-heavy exhilaration, when you want to be arrested, or join the Foreign Legion, or tear off a bizarre party in the Apache district. And then one morning you wake up just five years older than you were the night before. Every bit of self-confidence you got in college leaks out, or at least mine did. I’m just emerging from a period of shakiness and doubt in myself that was pretty morbid for about two weeks.” One thing that shook Reed’s self-confidence was the utter lack of self-distrust in his fellow-alumni in Paris. He was associating, on fairly intimate terms, with men who had snubbed him in col­ lege. Paris, which had so excited him and changed his ideas, did not deflect them an iota from the complacent pursuit of the way of life they had followed in Cambridge. Except that they took full advantage of the opportunities for promiscuity, they lived lives that differed scarcely at all from those they had lived on Mount Auburn Street. They knew what they wanted, and he did not. He was tempted to conform to their standards, but every concession he made seemed disastrous. Finally he told him­ self, “If you try to pretend you are wise, you’re a goner; some­ body’ll get you sooner or later. Therefore say your mind on everything, no matter how stupid it seems. If someone talks high philosophy, and you think low, out with it, and be despised if necessary.” “I find myself at outs with all the world,” he exclaimed, “and it must be my fault.” He wished he could be “a lazy philosopher, like Waldo, who can sit on his tail, at friends with all the world, and suck the sweetness of things.” He wished he could settle down, like Gluyas Williams, who had come to Paris to study art, and, though baffled and disappointed, was driving himself every daylight hour in his studio. He did not know what to think or what to do. He began to wonder if his father, who had been defeated for Congress and was having to return to the selling of insurance, could afford the luxurious and leisurely education of his two sons. The realization grew that he must return to Amer­ ica and find a job. John Reed’s remedy for melancholy was, of course, action,

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and the kind of action that proved most effective was travel. He began the exploration of as much of France as lay within easy reach of Paris. In the intervals between his trips, he wrote short stories and accounts of his journeys. As Christmas drew near, and the thought of the sacrifices his mother and father had made became sharper, he wrote a poem for his mother. Gluyas Wil­ liams, who had always thought of Reed as uncommonly free from sentiment and even ruthless, was amazed to find him, one afternoon, hand-lettering and decorating the poem, a task to which he had devoted himself for days. He planned one more trip before he returned to America. He set off alone to the south of France, to Orange, Avignon, Taras­ con, and Marseilles. Avignon he thought the most beautiful city he had ever seen. “I went to a Medieval theatre last night, slept in a Pre-Raphaelite bed, and am now eating an early Renaissance lunch.” He became excited about the Provençal poets, especially Mistral, whose “Mireille” he tried to translate into English verse. “Marseilles,” he wrote his father, “is a great city. I imagined such a place, once, where all the nations meet and jostle on the Cannabière, where there is a port that beats anything I ever saw, and a restricted district that has Hell lashed to the mast; but I never hoped to see it.” He arrived at night, chose a hotel “as is my custom, right off the bat, without inquiries or the consulta­ tion of guides or other holy writs,” and immediately sought out the district that Baedeker described as “dangerous after dark.” He stayed there until one, “talking with all the motherly old prostitutes, and childish young prostitutes, and Lascar sailors.” He went over the ground of Monte Christo, spent hours on the quais, and climbed the mountain to the Church of Notre Dame de la Garde to look down over the city to the Mediterranean. “Marseilles,” he wrote, “is a much more romantique city than Paris, if you know what I mean. For instance, you see the sun go down over the Louvre, and you know it’s going down over the English channel and the Hebrides. You see it set at Marseilles, and it goes to bed behind the Pillars of Hercules, with the na­ tions tacking out to sea from Marseilles to fish in their red-sailed feluccas. In Paris, the Seine flows into the Manche, where the fast mail-boats tear across from Havre to Southampton; at Mar4.

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seilies, the turquoise water leads your eyes gently out through the jungle of masts to the blue horizons—beyond them are Italy and Greece, Asia and Egypt, Algiers and Spain! The wind comes down from Germany at Paris—the mistral brings to Marseilles a sound of solemn bells from# Avignon and guitars from Arles, and the smell of Provence. At Paris, Notre Dame and the Louvre are elegant, spic-and-span; at Marseilles, there is a Greek inscription on the walls of the Chateau St. Jean, at the entrance of the Old Port, which the waves of the Phoenician Sea have worn thin for centuries and centuries. Paris is fine and insidious and chic—Mar­ seilles is bluff and masculine.” He left Marseilles to go to Toulon, where he met Waldo Peirce and Harold Taylor. With them were three friends of the Chadwicks, Madeleine and Marguerite Filon, nieces of a famous scholar, and Mme. Beaurain. The six of them walked together along the coast to Monte Carlo, taking their time, turning aside now and then into the mountains, staying in little hotels, swim­ ming whenever they felt like it. The men bore the packs, and they all carried long bamboo canes. They visited Roman ruins, laughed back at the wondering people of the seaside resorts, went fishing in a hired boat on the Mediterranean. Reed chose the routes and the inns, and managed the money. After nine days they came to Nice, spent an evening at the Casino, and went on to Monte Carlo. The first evening Peirce, having lost all that he could afford, went back to his room. Reed came in much later, so excited that his roommate was sure he had won heavily at the tables. He was engaged to Madeleine Filon. The trip had been “a dream of joy from beginning to end,” and anything less than a grand romantic gesture would be anti-climax. As soon as he could get his things together, he left for America “to make a million dol­ lars and get married.”

V Proud New York

only one stop—at Cambridge—John Reed returned to Portland. Family finances he found rather worse than he had expected. Although the real estate owned by the Reeds and the Greens theoretically represented a co fortable sum, it was so burdened with mortgages and the owner­ ship was so divided that his father could realize little money from it, and was having difficulty in meeting daily expenses. There was no doubt that the son would have to find a job as soon as possible. His mother and father tried to be pleasant about the engage­ ment, but he could see that they were distressed. Their friends were dismayed at his planning to marry a French girl, and his friends were dismayed at his planning to marry at all. They asked him how he planned to support a wife on rejection slips, and he had no answer except to set his jaw and consign the whole city to hell. If he had to find a job, he had no intention of looking for it in Portland. Despite his mother’s objections, he hastened back to New York, where the first thing he did was to join the Harvard Club and the second was to get in touch with Lincoln Steffens. Steffens said, “I guess you will have your chance.” He had al­ ways regarded Reed and Lippmann, whom he had already placed on Everybody's, as his boys. He secured Reed a tempo­ rary position on the Globe and then set him to work on the American Magazine. Reed had been a little afraid of Steffens when he met him at Harvard; he seemed too serious, too wise, too difficult to talk 64 aking

M

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to. But now the man’s kindness swept all reserve away. “You can do anything you want to,” said Steffens, and Reed believed him. From then on Reed took all his difficulties to Steffens, who smiled and understood and let the boy solve his problems for himself. From then on Steffens stood with Copeland—the two men who made Reed want to do nothing unworthy. And Stef­ fens had something to give Reed’s mind. The job on the American, Steffens warned, was merely a springboard; it would do for the time being. The magazine was changing. It was still publishing the work of the muckrakers who had taken it over in 1905, the old McClure’s crowd, Stef­ fens himself, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, William Allen White. Miss Tarbell was writing on the tariff and Baker on the revolt against Taft. Albert Jay Nock, who was on the staff, ex­ pounded the single tax, and Frederick Taylor wrote on scientific management. But the proportion of fiction grew larger and larger, serials by W. J. Locke and Frances Hodgson Burnett, stories by Samuel Hopkins Adams, Neith Boyce, Edna Ferber, and Dorothy Canfield. And John Siddall, developing the meth­ ods that were to make the American so profitable an organ of the gospel of success, had introduced a department called “Inter­ esting People.” Reed’s work was purely routine: correcting proof, reading manuscripts, and, later, helping to make up the magazine. To supplement the meager salary he took ah additional job as busi­ ness manager of a quarterly, Landscape Architecture, which was soon buried beneath a pile of bills. The million was a long way off. He could afford to forget the million, however, because in June he broke his engagement. In February he wrote an elo­ quent letter to Waldo Peirce from Portland, beseeching him to forsake his vagabond ways, to find his true love and settle down with her. In July he informed Peirce: “A man does not meet his predestined mate—never. He could love and be married and be happy with any one of a thousand.” “The nightmare of this spring!” he cried. “To have to write—to have to be passionate every other day.” Besides, he said, “I was sentimental about it, and remained chaste up to the other night.” Five months was a

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long time for the enchantment of the Mediterranean to last. His family was very glad. There was more time for literary work now, though he had been prolific enough before. He saved each rejection slip, and the number grew. Out of his six months in Europe came an essay, “A Dash Into Spain,” which went from magazine to maga­ zine and always came back, and half a dozen short stories. “Over­ board” was taken in hand by Julian Street and finally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. “The Man from the Seine” found its way to the Century office, and appeared, with some revision, a year after it had been written. “Showing Mrs. Van” was, after many delays, taken by the Smart Set. Other stories were less fortunate. The first pieces he had published were an editorial, “Immi­ grants,” which Collier’s took, and an essay, “The Involuntary Ethics of Big Business,” which a magazine called Trend accepted and printed but did not pay for until Reed had brought suit. Steffens liked “Immigrants” well enough, but the essay, he gently suggested, was a little dubious. It tried to prove that the big business man, who seeks only efficiency and profit, miracu­ lously achieves beauty, liberty, and justice. Reed called it a fable; Steffens—but it was not his way—could have found a bet­ ter word. Other essays, including a facetious discussion of the quick lunch and an elaborate satire on the theatre, went the way of so many of the short stories, but within a year after he arrived in New York Reed had had work accepted by Collier’s, the Ameri­ can, the Saturday Evening Post, the Forum, and the Century. Arthur Foote had set one of his poems, “The Wanderer to His Heart’s Desire,” to music. He had been elected to the Dutch Treat Club. Robert Benchley had asked him for advice on how to become a writer, and Copey had requested him to speak to English 12. The editors of the American were beginning to value him as a contributor as well as a colleague: they had printed three brief articles by him, including a tribute to Copey which it had been a satisfaction to write, and a number of poems. The successful men at the Dutch Treat Club, the Irwins, Tom Mas­ son, Rupert Hughes, James Montgomery Flagg, Irvin Cobb,

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Julian Street, the men who knew what the public wanted and how to get paid for supplying it, said that John Reed was a com­ ing man.

Long before he could regard it as the scene of his success, John Reed loved New York. It was the enchanted city.

O let some young Timotheus sweep his lyre Hymning New York. Lo! Every tower and spire Puts on immortal fire! This city, which ye scorn For her rude sprawling limbs, her strength unshorn,— Hands blunt from grasping, Titan-like, at Heav’n,— Is a world wonder vaulting all the Seven!

Rome, Babylon, Athens, and Troy were gone. Romance was here: This spawning filth, these monuments uncouth Are but her wild, ungovernable youth. But the sky-scrapers, dwarfing earthly things,— Ah, that is how she sings! Wake to the vision shining in the sun! Earth’s ancient, conquering races rolled in one, A world beginning,—and yet nothing done! The vantage point from which he began his affectionate, un­ tiring explorations of the city was Greenwich Village. The Vil­ lage, with its vestiges of ancient respectability and its neighbor­ ing slums, grew slowly towards Bohemian notoriety. At 42 Washington Square, Reed and three Harvard friends, at Reed’s suggestion, rented rooms in the fall of 1911. Robert Andrews and Alan Osgood had been on the Lampoon, Robert Rogers on the Monthly. Andrews, who had gone through college in three years and was now working in the advertising department of Lamont, Corliss and Company, was tart and critical, quick to ridicule excesses or expose fallacies. Osgood, perhaps the least mature of the quartet, Reed liked for that very reason. He was always gay, good-natured, ready to play. When the four of

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them started out together for an evening, Reed and Osgood, running ahead, would alternately hide in doorways and leap out at each other. Even the Village gaped at them, and waiters at the Brevoort trembled at their arrival. Rogers, who had gone to work on the Brooklyn Eagle, with Hans von Kaltenborn, Sam­ uel Duff McCoy, and Don Marquis, was, already, a little too thick-set for street races, and he and Andrews joined in sardonic commentary on the behavior of their roommates. Usually there was some other Harvard man with them. Joe Adams, working for an investment house in Chicago, would stay for a week or two. Alfred Kuttner joined them for part of the year. Alan Seeger, who Had come down from New Hampshire to take a position at the Spanish Museum, gave up his job out of sheer emotion when he fell in love, and spent most of his time at 42 Washington Square. He would walk in with his white, mask-like face and his stony eyes, and stand about until some­ body fed him. If no one was at home, he would leave his poems under the door, with a note asking Reed to sell them if by any chance they could be sold. Then he would go and lie on the wharves. But the most important resident of the house, so far as Reed was concerned, was Lincoln Steffens. Reed had persuaded him to come there, and he had rooms underneath theirs. Whenever he was in town, Reed would come banging into his room, any time after midnight, and tell him in excited superlatives what he had seen or done. Steffens would listen, without impatience, whether the talk was about girls or revolutionists, but in time it occurred to him that Reed was losing good literary material and he was losing sleep. “Write it down,” he said. Reed did, and the next day Steffens would criticize what he had written and make him re-write it. And he was as ready to deal with personal prob­ lems as literary ones. “You’re not in love,” he wrote Reed from one of his trips out of town, “or you’d never put it that way. ‘Damn it! I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love again.’ You’re not and you weren’t before. So watch out.” Steffens was even ready to lend money on the proper occa­ sions. Reed was hard up a good deal of the time, and at first he tried to borrow from Steffens to pay his rent and other expenses.

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Steffens refused. “No regular bills, Jack,” he said; “but when­ ever you want money for some wasteful, idiotic affair that no­ body else would think of, then you can come to me.” Reed took him at his word, and in the Christmas holidays he suddenly demanded a considerable sum. Edward Hunt had come down from Cambridge at Christmas, worn out by eighteen months in the dean’s office after four exacting years in college, and prostrated by the sudden death of his brother in South America. Reed decided he must have a vacation: he would take him to Bermuda. Without telling Hunt, he wrote Dean Hurlbut and President Lowell, both of whom heartily consented. He wrote Hunt’s mother and got her approval. Then he obtained leave of absence from the American, and bullied Robert Rogers into asking the Eagle for a vacation. Finally, when every other provision had been made, he borrowed the money from Steffens. Hunt, suddenly informed of the project, thought of a dozen reasons why he could not go. Reed confronted him with a let­ ter or telegram to meet each objection. Lowell had wired, “Take Hunt by all means,” and, Reed threatened to follow this injunc­ tion if it meant the use of knock-out drops. Hunt gave in. They left on the coldest day of the winter of 1911-12. The steam pipes froze. There were six berths in the stateroom, and one was occupied by an aged actor who was dying of tubercu­ losis, and another held a groaning convalescent from blood-poi­ soning. Hunt became seasick, went on deck, and just escaped when a heavy sea wrenched off an iron ladder and sent it crashing through the rail. Reed wrote:

*

Each steward marked his helpless prey And Hunt became a leetle gray As Coney Island fell away Across an ocean bleak. But once they were in Bermuda, it was extraordinarily pleas­ ant. Reed, of course, was their guide. Hunt, slight and wan, eagerly followed his impetuous lead, and Tubby Rogers smiled and chuckled as he bobbed along beside them. Hamilton was too expensive, and they went to St. George’s, where Reed immedi­

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ately made friends with the garrison and found entertainment for them. Hunt’s natural charm expanded in the benevolent warmth, and he returned to Cambridge with an ebullience that made Reed and Rogers rejoice. They felt that the money had been well expended, and began to pay it; back to Steffens, wrap­ ping bills as they could spare them around his door knob. After this had gone on for a few weeks, Reed announced that he didn’t intend to go on paying for the rest of life and demanded a state­ ment. When Steffens realized that neither he nor they had kept any account, he canceled the debt, and Reed danced with joy. There was always some kind of excitement at 42 Washington Square. When Rogers was leaving town for a time, Reed insisted that there must be a farewell party at the Brevoort, and, after the half-dozen of them had had enough of eating and drinking, he led the whole party to the Grand Central. Rogers said good­ bye, got on the train, found his berth, and prepared to retire. Andrews and Reed waited until he was partly undressed, and then rushed into the car and brought him out onto the platform. Hilarity made it seem foolish to go home, and so, when the train had finally left, they went into a saloon. A man came up and spoke to them, mentioning his name, which they pretended not to understand. Reed called him Box, Andrews addressed him as Cox, McCoy named him Sox. They tired of the game, and wan­ dered over to Times Square. While they were in Child’s, the same man appeared, and they again hailed him as Box, Cox, and Sox. Angered, he stated with dignity his full name and address. Reed remembered them, and, as soon as they left the restaurant, led the others to a telegraph office, where each of the trio sent the gentleman a long collect telegram. By now Reed was determined to show his friends what Fulton Street Market looked like in the early morning. They must go and see “the red and green and gold sea things glisten in the blue light of the sputtering arcs.” They did, stopping now and then for another dnnk, and Reed realized that he was unlikely to be equal to the day’s work. He sent a telegram to Phillips: “Having spent last night in a barrel of squid will not be at work. Reed.” The idea pleased him, and subsequently he either did try sleep­ ing with squid or convinced himself that he had, for he wrote:

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I have watched the summer day come up from the top of a pier of the Williamsburgh Bridge, I have slept in a basket of squid at the Fulton Street Market.

To his roommates he seçmed a mad playboy with a streak of poetry, but to strangers he was a very puzzling young fellow. A popular illustrator, who was under contract to do a series of sketches of European celebrities, was looking for some one to write the accompanying interviews. A friend suggested Reed. She found him breezy, nice-mannered, smiling, broad-shoul­ dered but a little flabby, good-looking in a pale-eyed, round-faced way. He was very confident that he could do what she wanted done, and his assurance amused and irked her. Deciding to test his qualifications, she suggested that he do an imaginary inter­ view with an elderly duchess who had recently arrived in New York. In the course of his article he described how his card was sent up to the duchess, speaking of the pneumatic tubes as the guts of the hotel, and saying that the card was evacuated. He liked the phrases, and, when the illustrator criticized them, took offense. He was not, he said, going to play second fiddle to a fussy female, and they separated. She thought him vain, theatri­ cal, and superficial. He was vain, perhaps, and a little theatrical, but he was not superficial. However unsettled and immature his ideas, his feel­ ings were deep and sound. Strongest of all his feelings at the moment was his love of New York, his city. “Within a block of my house,” he wrote, “was all the adventure in the world; within a mile was every foreign country.” Night after night he wan­ dered the streets from his Éeloved skyscrapers downtown to the obscurest comers of the city. He was never tired of the alien towns of the East Side, loved the shrill markets under the roar­ ing bridges and the clamorous pushcarts with their smoky flares. “I know Chinatown, and Little Italy, and the quarter of the Syrians; the marionette theatre, Sharkey’s and McSorley’s sa­ loons, the Bowery lodging houses and the places where the tramps gather in winter; the Haymarket, the German Village, and all the dives of the Tenderloin.” The girls that walked the streets were friends of his, and he

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talked with drunken sailors off ships from the world’s ends. He found wonderful restaurants where he could try the foods of all the nations. Chance acquaintances told him how to get dope, where to go to hire a man to kill an enemy, what to do to get into gambling rooms and secret dance-halls. He found the old, beautiful, leisurely squares and streets that were being sub­ merged by the advance of the slums. He went to gangsters’ balls at Tammany Hall, took part in an excursion of the Tim Sullivan Association, joined the surging crowds at Coney Island. He knew as well the houses along Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, the fashionable hotels, the festive first-nights at theatres. The theatre always stirred him. He saw everything that came to the city: John Barrymore in Uncle Sam and Ethel Barrymore in The Witness for the Defense, Margaret Anglin in Green Stock­ ings, Otis Skinner in Kismet, Mrs. Fiske in Lady Patricia, David Warfield in The Return of Peter Grimm, Weber and Fields in Hokey-Pokey. He saw the Irish Players do Riders to the Sea and The Rising of the Moon and the Little Theatre do Gals­ worthy’s Pigeon. He stood in line for hours to see the opening game of the World’s Series, sat in the cheering section at the Harvard-Yale game, took his friends to Barnum and Bailey’s circus at the Garden. Though he had never admitted it to himself, John Reed had been looking for romance only in the past; that was why he had written his short stories about the end of Atlantis or the decline of the Pharaohs, and his poems about Guinevere and Melisande. In New York he learned to love and to write about the things he saw. “There I got my first perceptions of the life of my time. The city and its people were an open book to me; everything had its story, dramatic, full of ironic tragedy and terrible humor. There I first saw that reality transcended all the fine poetic in­ ventions of fastidiousness and medievalism. I was not happy or well long away from New York.” Lincoln Steffens listened with joy to Reed’s stories of the city. He wanted Reed to let his eyes do everything for him that they could. He introduced him to radicals of every variety, Socialists, anarchists, single-taxers, labor leaders, and “all the hair-splitting Utopians and petty doctrine-mongers who cling to the skirts of

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Change.” Occasionally he recommended books, which Reed would buy at Frank Shay’s bookshop, and perhaps finish. But Steffens knew that ideas alone didn’t mean much to Reed, who said, “I have to see.” He did see, and, with Steffens’ unobtrusive help, felt and understood what he saw: “I couldn’t help but ob­ serve the ugliness of poverty and all its train of evil, the cruel inequality between rich people who had too many motor-cars and poor people who didn’t have enough to eat. It didn’t come to me from books that the workers produced all the wealth of the world, which went to those who did not earn it.” This was what Socrates Steffens wanted. Reed began to realize that he had been privileged. Through no merit of his own, he had been given opportunties that had enabled him not merely to escape from poverty but also to learn to enjoy the color and drama of life. He had always sympathized with underdogs, re­ volting equally against the little injustices of snobbish society and the major injustices that wete done to Indians and Chinese on the Coast and to the poor of New York. He began to feel more than sympathy, however; intimacy with the more rebellious underdogs brought liking and respect. He hated uplifting re­ formers, but he admired men who fought for their rights. Slowly he began to take cognizance of the changes that were taking place in him. He did not sit down and try to formulate a philosophy, but he did experiment in revaluation. Before he had come to New York life had offered nothing more important than Harvard, and his four years there still seemed exciting and sig­ nificant. He went to Cambridge as often as he could, was delighted to discuss witlj his successors the problems of the Monthly and the Lampoon, was proud to be invited to speak to English 12. But he knew that his values were changing. To record and clarify these changes he wrote an essay, never pub­ lished, called “The Harvard Renaissance.” The essay praised Harvard for its long line of rebellious indi­ viduals, its “army of independent thinkers,” and went on to de­ scribe, in detail, the sudden surge of rebellious activity that had come in his undergraduate years. Perhaps aware that, if his own nature had permitted, he might have belonged to the tradition of conformity rather than the tradition of revolt, he paid tribute to

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the men who had never been tempted by the glamor of the final clubs. He gave most credit for the renaissance to the Socialist Club, to which he had never belonged. In the fall of 1911 the undergraduate radicals had clashed with the administration, which had refused to' permit Mrs. Pankhurst to speak in a college building, and Reed made his article an at­ tack on the authorities and a plea for free speech. The respect­ able alumni had come to Lowell’s support. A person calling him­ self “an ex-Editor of the Harvard Advocate” had produced a booklet, “The Harvard Radicalettes,” in which he described the Socialists “with gawky, ill-fitting clothes hanging badly on their puny figures.” Samuel A. Eliot, Jr., grandson of the former president, had presided at a meeting for Emma Goldman, whom he had addressed as comrade. The ex-editor of the Advocate wrote:

We hang our heads in shame To speak his grandson’s name Unhonored, who by dint Of yellow journal’s print Has spread his name abroad To win the worthless laud Of those who go about With clamor and with shout In high unselfish guise To flout the good and wise And ravish for their spoil The fruit of others’ toil, With social dynamite More base than open fight.

In answering such abuse Reed was making clear to himself what had been important in his four Harvard years and what had not. He was far from feeling indifference to the university, but at least he could discriminate. He was also beginning to discriminate in literary matters. He had come to New York with the same desire he had had when he entered Harvard, the desire to win all possible prizes. When he had thought of himself as a writer, he had thought of the

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widely-circulated magazines, the magazines that paid big prices. But in a year marked by unusual success he had begun to under­ stand how the prizes were paid for. In an essay called “Art for Art’s Sake,” apparently written for the clarification of his own mind, he recorded that the men he respected, such as Lippmann and Steffens, all agreed that their best work could not be pub­ lished in the popular magazines. On the other hand, John Siddall, whom he liked and whose shrewdness he acknowledged, pointed out that, if a writer did not write as these magazines demanded, he had no audience. The writer, Siddall said, should be humble. Failing to recognize the full insidiousness of this defense of the status quo, Reed impulsively rebelled against it. “The trouble with all the American mediocrities,” he exclaimed, “is that they want individuals to all be worms and grovel on the ground.” Shelley, Nietzsche, Emerson, and Whitman had not been hum­ ble, he declared, and added Shaw, Ibsen, and Rodin to the list. As for him, he would write what he wanted to write: “A real artist goes on creating for art’s sake whether he achieves publica­ tion or not.” Before John Reed could discover what happens to the real art­ ist who goes on creating for art’s sake, there came a sudden and painful break in his literary progress. At the end of June his mother wired that his father was dangerously ill and he must return to Portland. Reed had been constantly drawing closer to his father. His mother wrote him lively letters, and he replied with long ac­ counts of what he was doing. But his father, out of his own bitterness, could understand the boy’s gayer but not less intense dissatisfaction with convention. His mother wanted him to meet the right kind of people in New York, and she had been able to supply him with letters of introduction. She did not care for society, she told him, any more than he did, but he might some day be grateful—and his wife, when he had one, certainly would be—for friends with position and prestige. His father wasted no time on such advice. He was naively delighted when Steffens introduced Reed to Theodore Roosevelt: “I was so pleased to have you meet Teddy as you did. He is all man and

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the greatest American alive.” But his main concern was that Jack should be free to live his life as he chose. He was delighted by his successes: “I think and talk of you every day and love and am proud of you every hour.” And he was not sorry that his son was thinking for himself and was interested in even bolder plans for the emancipation of mankind than he and his fellow-progressives had dared to dream. Both Mr. and Mrs. Reed had become deeply concerned about money. “Debt is an awful burden,” Mrs. Reed wrote; “try to keep out of it.” “Do try to keep out of debt and save a little,” her husband added. “I have been cursed with debts all my life and one of my greatest griefs now is that I cannot afford to make you an allowance.” Speaking of his brother-in-law, he said, “He has no sense at all any more than have the balance of the Green family about money matters.” There was reason for his bitterness: Tod, as the Reeds called Mrs. Green, had started off, with the last of the Green money, on a trip around the world. Mr. Reed commented with the savagery that had made him feared at the Arlington Club: “Yesterday came a large photo­ graph of Tod mounted on a camel, holding with a death grip to a Bedouin sheik, who looked as if he could cheerfully chop her with a scimitar. Another son of the desert, remaining care­ fully out of reach, looks as if he had the best of his partner. In the background stands the Sphinx with a nauseated expres­ sion. . . . Surely the long line of Pharaohs were in luck to have become only a memory before Tod invaded Egypt. If Moses could have subsidized her there would have been eight instead of seven plagues.” Because he knew how much generosity lay behind such ex­ travagant diatribes, just as he knew how much deep feeling for mankind went into the enthusiasm for Teddy, Reed loved and admired his father. But only after he was back in Portland, in the last few days around the deathbed, did he realize how much had been sacrificed for him and his brother Harry. Harry had just been graduated from Harvard, where he had lived, as Jack had lived, like a rich man’s son. Perhaps Jack, thinking of Harry’s kind of success, his election to the right clubs won by unimaginative conformity, won by doing nothing, by merely

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making an infallible distinction between the right people and the wrong, and thinking, too, of the conclusions he had already reached about Harvard, may have wondered if the results justified the strain under which his father had at last broken. But such doubts could npt diminish his appreciation of the spirit, not merely uncomplaining but even ardent and gay, in which the sacrifices had been made. C. J. Reed died on the morning of July 1, 1912. John Reed, who had thought of him as a friend as well as an indulgent father, felt for the first time a bitter grief. The city of Port­ land, though some of its leading men, as Jack knew, were secretly glad, paid official tribute. Reed’s friends wrote him, Steffens, the men at 42 Washington Square, the men on the American, He was restless and tortured and would sometimes walk all night. He tried to write down what he felt and was shocked at the inadequacy of his verse. At last, sometime during the summer, he wrote: Calm he lies there, In the brave armor he alone could bear, With a proud shield of Honor at his side, And a keen sword of wit. And when the tide Mysterious—when the swift, exultant Spring Thrills all this hillside with awakening, Wild-flowers will know and love him, blossoming.

It would have been easier if he could have returned immedi­ ately to New York, but the complexities of the family’s affairs kept him three months in* Portland. There were old friends, of course, to visit, but they quickly lost their savor for him. As the first shock of his father’s death passed, he longed more and more for his city, New York. Even a trip to the headwaters of the Amazon, which Harry Kemp suggested, seemed less exciting than the wanderings about the East Side he so deeply missed. Finally, out of his nostalgia for 42 Washington Square, came a poem, humorous but tender, The Day in Bohemia. The book is dedicated to Lincoln Steffens—“one of us; the only man who understands my arguments”:

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Steffens, I hope I am doing no wrong to you By dedicating this doggerel song to you; P’raps you’ll resent The implied compliment, But light-hearted Liberty seems to belong to you.

Even in artists I notice a tendency To let old Daily Bread gain the ascendancy, Making that petty boss Sort of a Setebos ’Stead of a useful but servile dependency. How can an artist create his Utopia With his best eye on the World’s cornucopia? See, for example; There’s recompense ample In just writing this—let us call it—epopæa.

Well, if these numbers recall a good year to you, And, as to me, certain things that are dear to you, Take them, you’re welcome, I’m with you till Hell come, Friend Steffens, consider me quaffing a beer to you! The poem describes a day: the morning at 42 Washington Square, then the office of the American, then a literary tea, and finally an evening of argument and revelry. It introduces a number of parodies, some of which had been published earlier, but for the most part it is a faithful reflection of what Reed loved in the life of the Village:

Yet we are free who live in Washington Square, We dare to think as Uptown wouldn’t dare, Blazing our nights with argument uproarious; What care we for a dull old world censorious When each is sure he’ll fashion something glorious? He does not forget the tenement back-yards:

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There spawn the overworked and underpaid Mute thousands;—packed in buildings badly made,— In stinking squalor penned,—and overflowing On sagging fire-escapes.

But he is chiefly concerned with the rooms “where the im­ mortal four spent many a blissful hour.” Apollo’s beams our humble house adorn, And wake th’ immortal four on Tuesday mom; Coincident, while still our ears we pound, The loud alarm-clock gives a horrid sound. With one bound, orient Osgood hits the floor. (Cerberean timeclocks guard his office door.) Reed, with a countenance whence joy has fled, Drags the resisting Rogers from his bed. But Andrews still the downy pillow presses, While every feature deep disgust expresses; And ere he once forsakes his virgin couch Accumulates his early morning grouch. At the American office he introduces Siddall, “the high-brow low-brow of the Magazine”; Albert Boyden, “the one who makes the wheels to go,” “great editor, great hustler through and through”; J. S. Phillips, “poet a third and two-thirds editor”; Albert J. Nock, “an anarchist in everything but art.” He describes an editorial conference, on poetry, with Nock quoting Matthew Arnold against his quotations from Whitman, and the other editors calling for the police. The party is at the studio of the great Umbilicus:

*

When young he studied on the Continent,— Eleven years in galleries he spent, Copied the Masters with minutest care, Learned what they ate, and how they wore their hair At last he knew so much, he was so deft, That neither vision, fire, nor self was left.

There we find the poet who produces one verse a year, the imitation Celt, the sedentary vagabond, the girl whose “job in

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life is simply to inspire,” the rich man “who tried to be Mae­ cenas and is Midas,” the artist who talks about vice, the artist who exists in dirt, and a dozen females—“the mild, the violent, the stout, the thin.” They talk— Cranks, cranks, cranks, cranks,— Blanks, blanks, blanks, blanks,— Talk about talking and think about thinking, And swallow each other without even blinking.

When some one rises to recite a sonnet, Reed retreats, and arrives at 42 Washington Square in time to join the other three of the immortal four for dinner. Bob Hallowell arrives, and they meet Sam McCoy and Wolf, a young German engineer, on the street: Balloon-like, Rogers bounces on ahead, Then slothful Samuel, less alive than dead, Ozzy and Herr, with one unmeaning grin, Talk gibberish you’ll find no meaning in. Reed following, elated and erect, Bob Hallowell—gloves, hat and all correct. Old Andrews singing harshly,—music wrong,— Last, like a wounded snake, drags his slow length along. Paglieri’s self directs us, with a leer To the round table waiting at the rear.

After they return to their rooms, and Hallowell lends them money with which to placate their landlady, friends arrive: Lippmann,—calm, inscrutable, Thinking and writing clearly, soundly, well; All snarjs of falseness swiftly piercing through, His keen mind leaps like lightning to the True; Our all unchallenged Chief! But . . . one Who builds a world, and leaves out all the fun,— Who dreams a pageant, gorgeous, infinite, And then leaves all the color out of it,— Who wants to make the human race, and me, March to a geometric Q.E.D.

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A timid footstep,—enter then the eager Keats-Shelley-Swinbume-Medieval-Seeger; Poe’s raven bang above Byronic brow, And Dante’s beak,—you have his picture now; In fact he is, though /eigning not to know it, The popular conception of a Poet. The unkempt Harry Kemp now thumps our door; He who has girdled all the world and more. Free as a bird, no trammels him can bind, He rides a box-car as a hawk the wind.

They argue until midnight, and finally adjourn to the Lafay­ ette. There is the last and best of the incidental songs: O let us humbly bow the neck To George Syl-ves-ter Vi-er-eck Who trolled us a merry little Continental stave Concerning the Belly and the Phallus and the Grave— It would have almost raised the hair Of Oscar Wilde or Bau-de-laire To hear Mr. Vi-er-eck so frank-ly rave Concerning the Belly and the Phallus and the Grave—

And in the last an-al-y-sis He says it nar-rows down to this: A fig for the favors that the high gods gave! Excepting the Belly and the Phallus and the Grave— If you have drunk Life to the lees You may console yourself with these; For me there are some things that I do not crave Among them the Belly and the Phallus and the Grave— What ho! for the Belly and the Phallus and the Grave The Belly and the Phallus And the ballad very gallus And the Grave! Late in September, Reed finally started back to New York. Sam McCoy, who was then in Indianapolis, had repeatedly

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urged him to stop for a visit on his way across the continent. Reed sent him a card from Chicago, explaining that his finan­ cial condition would not permit any side-trips. “I’ve ridden the rails so far,” he wrote, “and have stayed my belly for the past three days with a bunch of bananas.” Whether that was liter­ ally true or not, Reed was quite penniless when he reached 42 Washington Square. Some of the group had left. Seeger was in Paris, Lippmann, though he was soon to return for the founding of the Republic, was at the moment assisting Schenectady’s Socialist Mayor Lunn. Rogers was leaving for Cambridge. And Alan Osgood, blithest of the roommates, was dead. “He had genius,” Reed wrote Alan’s mother, “quite beyond us, and more than he himself realized.... It was always a joy to be with him. . .. We used to marvel at his unfailing laughter and kindness.” Reed and Osgood had planned to sail before the mast, around the Cape of Good Hope to China. Now that, like so many other plans, could never be carried out. McCoy wrote a poem, “Youth,” in tribute to Osgood and to the life that, he felt, could not be recaptured, and Reed, liking it, persuaded Phillips to publish it in the Ameri­ can. Reed, too, felt that youth was slipping by, but for the moment he was happy at being back in New York. Edward Hunt was now working on the American and living at Number 42, and in the winter Reed was startled to run across another classmate, Robert Edmond Jones, thin and hungry, wandering from im­ presario to impresario. He and Hunt took Jones in, called upon Hallowell and other friends for assistance, and armed him for the conflict with New York. Reed kept a card catalog of the manuscripts he sent to the magazines, labeled “Posthumous and Juvenile Works of J. S. Reed, Bart.” There were fewer rejection slips now. Even some of the earlier stories, brought out and refurbished, were taken by editors who had learned to know the name of Reed. On the whole he had reason for satisfaction, but, after the elation of being back in the city dwindled away, he was more discontented than he had been since the morning in Paris when he woke up and found himself five years older. Steffens encouraged him:

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“You haven’t yet found your form, your ‘lay,’ your ‘line,’ as you wish to express it.” When he did find his line, Steffens as­ sured him, nothing could stop him. Reed was not so certain. There was not much that he had published that seemed to him representative of what he had wanted to do. His articles for the American had, with the exception of the reminiscence of William James and the tribute to Copey, been routine exer­ cises. The pair of short stories in the Century about the stupid but lucky M. Vidoq were mechanical, though he had enjoyed elaborating the humorous details and even made a third attempt with the same formula. He had exploited the same tricks of face­ tiousness in the two stories Willard Huntington Wright, who had been a classmate in their freshman year, had taken for the Smart Set. “Overboard” had been given the stamp of Julian Street’s deft Saturday Evening Post manner. “The Swimmers” was derivative melodrama. He felt better, of course, about the poetry. “The Wanderer to His Heart’s Desire” and “Deep-Water Song,” were, it is true, a little too much after the fashion of Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman, but they were firmer and fresher than anything he had written in the same vein in college. Certain occasional poems he had done for the American—“April,” “A Song for May,” and “June in the City”—were clean and pleasant. He had grown oratorical in “Revolt,” which Viereck’s International had taken: Oh, there is peace in wrong-doing, Joy in the blasphemous thing, Sweet is the taste of a prodigal waste,— Lawless the songs that we sing. And you, who are holy, have made it,— Have ticketed men and their ways,— Have taken the zest from all that was best In these contemptible days. In a few poems he had gone beyond Vagabondia and Bohemia. The love of New York, city of enchantment, almost inarticulate as yet, had reached partial expression in “A Hymn to Manhat­ tan” and in “The Foundations of a Skyscraper”:

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Clamor of unknown tongues, and hiss of arc Clashing and blending; screech of wheel on wheel,— Naked, a giant’s back, tight-muscled, stark, Glimpse of mighty shoulder, etched in steel. Even his romanticism achieved maturity in the new and re­ sourceful resonance of his lines. “Tamburlaine,” which he called “an organ prelude,” begins:

A voiceless shaking of the air . . . Then a low shuddering of sound, Vibrant, thunderoils, like the profound Pulsation of great wings. O rare— In the high-vaulted transept’s gloom Wakes sonant echoing, and the deep Tone-breakers gather ponderously and leap From beam to beam, like sullen boom Of lazy summer thunder. See! On the bare rock-rimmed Scythian plain The swarthy shepherd Tamburlaine . . .

And it ends:

Falls like a sea-wind at sundown The full-toned sonorous battle-chant; Yet the sound-surf reverberant Rolls the dim-springing nave adown, Rolls thunderous—subsiding—low— In a burnt, treeless land where loom The world's high mountains, lies a tomb—

Vibrant the shuddering tremolo— A tomb half-hid with drifting sand, Nameless—in Samarkand.

In “Sangar” romanticism served the purposes of allegory. The poem, which Lincoln Steffens insisted on regarding as “a fierce poem denouncing me,” was meant as a tribute to his settlement of the MacNamara case. In the midst of battle—

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leaps one into the press— The Hell ’twixt front and front— Sangar, bloody and tom of dress, (He has borne the brunt.) “Hold!” crifs, “Peace! God’s Peace! Heed ye what Christus says—” And the wild battle gave surcease In amaze.

Sangar tells the men on both sides that they are brothers. He is called a blasphemer by the priest, and is slain by his own son, and the war goes on. Oh, there was joy in Heaven when Sangar came. Sweet Mary wept, and bathed and bound his wounds, And God the Father healed him of despair, And Jesus gripped his hand, and laughed and laughed. His poetry was praised by poets he respected, Edwin Arling­ ton Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Sara Teasdale, Harriet Mon­ roe. Albert Jay Nock, though he might quarrel with Reed on esthetic principles, had no doubt that his colleague was a poet. Percy MacKaye wrote warmly about “Sangar,” and Reed re­ plied: “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your note appre­ ciating my ‘Sangar.’ No one has ever before written me so about anything I ever did. It opens up vast possibilities and stimulates my imagination to conceive a time when I shall be able to tell people a little part of the glorious things I see. Every day of my life I see more of them.” Reed was in dead earpest about his poetry, and it distressed him to realize that poetry could never win for him the kind of success that he was determined to achieve. The practical men of the Dutch Treat Club told him that poetry was dead. He knew that they were wrong. He had read nothing as yet of Frost’s or Sandburg’s, but he realized that Robinson was trying to say something that had not been said, and he picked up and read with curiosity and satisfaction Vachel Lindsay’s Rhymes to be Traded for Bread. And he was beginning to understand what was wrong with poetry. “I have found,” he wrote Harriet Monroe, “that among men of whatever class, if they are deeply

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stirred by emotion, poetry appeals; as, indeed, all the arts ap­ peal. The apathetic, mâwkishly-religious middle class are our enemies. . . . Art must cease, I think, to be for the esthetic en­ joyment of a few highly sensitive minds. It must go back to its original sources.” The magazine editors were degrading poetry. That, he dis­ covered, was not all they were degrading. In the spring of 1912 he had written a little sketch of New York life called “Where the Heart Is,” the first of many such sketches he was to write, born out of his nocturnal adventures and the love and exaltation that the city roused in him. It was not a neat empty tale with a surprise ending; it was just a story of Martha, who had left the Haymarket, where she was a dancing partner, to see Europe. She had done much respectable sight-seeing, and then, when her funds were low, had become the mistress of an amorous and wealthy Portuguese, who had taken her to Rio de Janeiro and kept her in luxury. But she could not forget New York, and back she came to the Haymarket. One editor after another rejected the story. Finally one of them explained: “A magazine is bought by the year. The father of the children, counting on its past record of avoiding the treatment of sex problems, allows the magazine to come into the house and to lie carelessly on the library table. His children read it, even before he looks it over himself. He counts on us to be the censor. And that is the main reason why magazines must be very careful about the points of view they present in their stories. You have been working at the American; you ought to know their point of view. You can’t over-ride such a proposition.” Such a theme, he concluded, could be treated only by a Daùdet, a Flaubert, or a de Maupassant: “The very delicacy of the problem renders necessary the highest form of literary skill.” Reed understood. “Where the Heart Is” was his first con­ tribution to the Masses. But John Reed loved success. He was flattered by being men­ tioned in F. P. A.’s column. He was very proud of being a member of the Dutch Treat Club. Irvin Cobb and James Mont­

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gomery Flagg called him by his first name. He talked about lit­ erary markets and prices with Julian Street and the Irwin brothers. He listened to the jests of Tom Masson and Charles Hanson Towne. He knew how much Owen Johnson was paid per word and Charles Dana Gibson per picture. They represented success, tangible, measurable, demonstrable success. When he had a chance to do a play for the Dutch Treat Club, to be produced at its annual dinner at Delmonico’s, he was as excited as he had been when he made the football team at Morristown or the Lampoon at Harvard. Bill Daly, one of the editors of Everybody's, composed the music. Reed wrote the words, and, despite the impressiveness of their reputations, would not allow the professional humorists of the club to alter a line. He hectored the performers as disrespectfully as he had bullied the Harvard cheering section. It was his show, and he insisted on doing it his own way. But he was very proud that he had been asked to do it, and he invited many of his friends to the dinner at which it was produced. Every magazine, an Immorality Play was the fruit of two years in the American office, two years of acceptances and rejections, two years of Dutch Treat Club luncheons. Much of what Reed wrote about the magazines was what every Dutch Treater felt. No one, for example, could be anything but jubilant when Charles Hanson Towne, dressed in bombazine with drooping curls and knitting needles, representing Century, Scribner's, and Harper's, sang:

You are mistresses of Mammon; I’m a literafy virgin— All the warmness of a salmon, All the passion of a sturgeon. I’m aristocratic, very, I’m a live obituary Of the giants literary Who have given up the ghost. In illuminating snatches Since the spring of Sixty-one I’ve been publishing dispatches From the battle of Bull Run.

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With life I do not bother, I’m caviar to most; In fact I am the Father, The Son, and Holy Ghost. Of refinement I’m a symbol On your literary table; All of culture in a thimble By the new Atlantic cable. And though Congress does not heed me, And the public does not read me, I’m convinced .the people need me From the Hudson to the Coast. O when Trollope kicked the bucket And when Dickens was no more I had half a mind to chuck it Till I found the Civil War. Aristocratic rather, Exclusiveness my boast; In fact I am the Father, The Son, and Holy Ghost.

And the wits of New York must have relished the Outlook's song: I’m a moderate reformer Just because reform’s the thing. I’ve a practical religion And my hat is in the ring. I’m a catch-as-can uplifter With a strong belief in jail. It’s a policy that gathers in the kale. I’m the blooming Christian Herald With the Christian part in hock. I’m the Homely Ladies’ Journal All excepting Mister Bok. I’m the Rev’rend Doctor Parkhurst, I’m all that sort of chaps. In fact, I’m Hamilton W.—Perhaps!

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It was amusing when McClure's complained that it had “raised so much hell” and “done it so well” that there was nothing left to say, or when the American explained how to blend reading matter and advertisements. The Cosmopolitan was fair game: Every month I’m full of spice And naughty Robert Chambers makes it nice. Some lingerie, a glimpse of stocking. Lips unlocking, nothing shocking. And Gibson hints at hidden beauty, Lovers’ booty, tutti frutti. Read me once and I’ll bet I can Refresh the tired business man.

It was a little more pointed to sing:

An honest magazine Needn’t tremble to be seen Abowing to a business man And taking off his hat. And it isn’t so surprising That we chase the advertising But alas we’ve got a secret worse than that. The grand finale was entitled “Thé Freedom of the Press.” There are such lines as A silly tale I’ve heard That round the town is flying That every monthly organ Is owned by J. P. Morgan. Now isn’t that absurd? Somebody must be lying.

And again— We’re all agreed, I guess, In this ourselves we flatter,

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No influence external Controls the monthly journal. It is our great success, Unbiased reading matter. The chorus goes— It must not be inferred That wealth is what we’re after. We greet that gibe absurd With supercilious laughter. The criminal and grafter, From wickedness deterred, Revere the printed word, Revere the printed word.

Of course none of it was taken as serious satire. Everybody congratulated Reed, who sold copies of The Day in Bohemia and grew shrill-voiced and happy as the liquor and the praise went to his head. But the suspicion persisted in the minds of some members of the club that they had somehow been be­ trayed. Samuel Merwin was to grumble for twenty years, “The trouble with Jack Reed was that he wasn’t housebroken.” And Julian Street would save his venom until, ten years after Reed’s death, the Saturday Evening Post would pay him well for put­ ting it down on paper. Just as, in college, Reed had irritated the men his ambitions should have counseled him to please, so, among the high-paid hacks of New York, the eagerness for success clashed with some impulse of defiance, and defiance won.

VI Profession: Poet

John Reed a surprisingly long time to discover that paying magazines get what they pay for. He could not learn from the experience of others; he had to find out for him­ self. What he had wanted on his arrival in New York in the spring of 19 u was success, in terms of both money and recog­ nition, and he wanted it so badly that some of his friends were worried. But he wanted it on his own terms. His integrity was not a matter of articulate»principles; it was, rather, a deep-rooted stubbornness, an almost physiological necessity to be himself. When he had learned to fashion salable commodities, and the lust to see his name in print had been gratified, he began to wonder if this was all he wanted; and what people called his vanity was strong enough to tell him that it wasn’t. There was no satisfaction in winning applause for conforming to the stand­ ards of others, he once more discovered; the only recognition that counted was recognition for what he really was. Two years of experimentation were ^necessary to convince him, but in the end he was convinced. Even after he had learned his lesson, he did not abandon the idea of the sort of success that the Dutch Treat Club appreci­ ated. He adopted the simple and familiar compromise of doing two kinds of writing: the kind the editors liked and the kind he liked. He knew the dangers of such a division of purpose: he had once written a story called “Success” about a young man who, beginning with a consecrated determination to write an epic in his spare time, ended by rejoicing in the adaptation of lines from his masterpiece to the purposes of a pink pill adver­ t took

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tisement. But he could not believe that these dangers existed for him. For the publication of what he wanted to write, there was, fortunately, the Masses, which Piet Viag had founded in Janu­ ary, 1911, as “an outgrowth of the cooperative side of Socialist activity.” Thomas Seltzer, the first editor, drew heavily on the fiction of Europe, printing stories by Tolstoy, Chirikov, Suder­ mann, and Bjorkman. Many of the muckrakers and Socialist in­ tellectuals contributed—John Spargo, Gustavus Myers, George R. Kirkpatrick, W. J. Ghent, and Eugene Wood—and Art Young, Charles Winter, and Maurice Becker did cartoons. During 1911 and 1912 the magazine limped aimlessly from left to right. Horatio Winslow succeeded Seltzer as editor and filled the magazine with his own stories. Piet Viag injected heavy propaganda for the cooperatives. All sorts of persons contributed occasional articles or stories: Thomas L. Masson, Inez Haynes Gillmore, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Will Irwin. Except for attacks on the direct action theories of the I.W.W. and defenses of parliamentarianism by Eugene Wood, Ellis O. Jones, Victor Berger, and Walter Lippmann, the Masses was indifferent to economic and political struggles, and even in liter­ ature it was a long way from the vanguard. Piet Viag, whose sacrifices had kept the Masses alive, became discouraged. Though the magazine sold for five cents a copy, the circulation remained low. Finally, in the autumn of 1912, he proposed to merge it with a suffragist paper in Chicago. But the magazine, despite all its wavering, had succeeded in creating a group of writers and artists that had some sort of common purpose. Of the founders, Eugene Wood, Hayden Carruth, Ellis O. Jones, Thomas Seltzer, Horatio Winslow, Art Young, and Charles and Alice Winter remained loyal. Inez Haynes Gillmore and Maurice Becker had become firm supporters. Mary Heaton Vorse and John Sloan had begun to contribute. Two of the workers in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, Leroy Scott and William English Walling, were interested. A num­ ber of these men and women met in the Winters’ studio and decided, at Art Young’s suggestion, to invite Max Eastman,

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until recently an instructor in esthetics at Columbia, to become responsible editor of a rejuvenated Masses, The magazine sought to be the expression, on the highest literary and artistic level, of the insurgent spirit in American life. Out of the middle-c^ss revolt at the turn of the century, with its muckraking and its trust-busting, its progressive gov­ ernors and its single-tax mayors, had come a great hope. The renaissance that John Reed had observed at Harvard had been only one seething crest on a great wave. The new insurgency was marked neither by unity nor clarity, but it had vigor and it was ubiquitous. Scarcely a writer or artist who was to have importance in the twenties was untouched by it. It found polit­ ical expression in anarchism as well as Socialism, and single­ taxers were allied with suffragists, free-lovers, and birth-con­ trollers. It owed much to the discovery that urban life made possible the escape from provincial Victorianism, and yet it was in no small part a revolt against the standardization that was supposed to have been wrought by the machine and the city. Vachel Lindsay and Sherwood Anderson, dreading industrial­ ism, were as much a part of it as Carl Sandburg, who sang the beauty of industry. It welcomed any attack on convention, and the same men and women wrote for the Masses and for Menck­ en’s Smart Set; but it made room for the Puritanism of Upton Sinclair and the piety of the Christian Socialists. It subscribed to the principles of realism in art, but its politics tended towards the romantic. It had the seriousness of strong convictions and the gayety of great hopes. John Reed was more a part of this than he knew. He did not suspect how many people shared his belief that literature must be emancipated from the stupidity and triviality of the bour­ geoisie and from the commercialism of the profit-making mag­ azines. The spell that New York cast upon him in his midnight adventures was felt by other young writers. He was not the only one who loved the bravery of the poor and grew indig­ nant at their suffering. Nor was he the only son of a Bull Moose father who laughed at the trumpetings of Teddy and pledged his allegiance to Eugene Debs and Big Bill Haywood. When he heard of the new plans for the Masses, John Reed

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wanted to help. Eastman told him that stories were needed, and he immediately thought of the little sketches he had written with so much affection and pleasure and had had so persistently rejected. Eastman praised his stories, selected “Where the Heart Is” for the January issue, and urged Rçed to send something every month. The realization, at the very beginning of the new venture, that there were men like Reed, men who wanted and needed the Masses, was one of the things that made the board of editors willing to take up the burden of debt and go on. With the March issue he was listed among the contributing editors. In the meantime he had drafted a statement of purpose. “We refuse to commit ourselves to any course of action,” he said, “except this: to do with the Masses exactly what we please. No magazine has ever done that in this country and preserved a wide influence. The Masses is neither a closet magazine nor a quarterly philosophic review. But we have perfect faith that there exists in America a wide public, alert, alive, bored with the smug procession of magazine platitudes, to whom What We Please will be as a fresh wind.” It was the Reed note, with just a touch of swagger in such phrases as, “We don’t even intend to conciliate our readers.” He paid his respects to the American and the other magazines for which he had written: “Poems, stories, and drawings rejected by the capitalistic press on account of their excellence will find a welcome in this magazine.” De­ fiance was the rock on which the Masses was to be built. But the defiance was not to be a meaningless gesture. “The broad purpose of the Masses” he wrote, “is a social one: to everlastingly attack old systems, old morals, old prejudices—the whole weight of outworn thought that dead men have saddled upon us—and to set up new ones in their places. Standing on the common sidewalk, we intend to lunge at spectres—with a rapier rather than a broad-axe, with frankness rather than innuendo. We intend to be arrogant, impertinent, in bad taste, but not vulgar. We will be bound by no one creed or theory of social reform, but will express them all, providing they be radical. . . . Sensitive to all new winds that blow, never rigid in a single view or phase of life, such is our ideal for the Masses.” It was a statement to which all the young radicals of 1913, all those

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who wanted more than Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, could subscribe. “And if,” John Reed added, “we want to change our minds about it—well, why shouldn’t we?” Although the statement was somewhat altered before it ap­ peared in the magazine,,Reed had expressed the spirit of the enterprise with considerable exactness. It called itself “a revolu­ tionary not a reform magazine,” but except for Max Eastman’s editorials under the heading “Knowledge and Revolution” and William English Walling’s page of news about the Socialist movement, it devoted little space to discussion of radical prin­ ciples. What boiled up on its pages was exactly the kind of chaotic revolt that John Reed felt inside himself, a powerful dissatisfaction and an unformulated hope. At first the artists— Art Young, Maurice Becker, and John Sloan—gave more effec­ tive expression to this insurgency than any of the writers, but gradually, in poems by Arturo Giovannitti, Louis Untermeyer, and Harry Kemp, in Reed’s sketches, and in Howard Brubaker’s paragraphs, there was a literature that matched the art. The editors, especially the younger ones, enjoyed their work. Untermeyer and Reed had been entrusted with the responsibility of selecting the poetry, and they shared their discoveries. Un­ termeyer wrote Reed: “Victor Jorbert is a find, a gem of the first water and a poet of purest ray serene. He is of the Elect, the Cognoscenti. I hail him and thank you for introducing him to me. There are lines in his stirring ode (or is it a march) that seem influenced by J. Gordon Coogler, but this is petty carp­ ing. I believe Mr. Jorbert is worthy of a place next to that Mr. Kennedy whose noble lines to ‘Bergson of Dynamic Mind’ are (to me) immortal: *

Read Ida Tarbell’s words; all noble deeds record; Learn of Dr. E. B. Davis in New York at Bedford.

What a couplet! I applaud the sentiment no less than the music —and gnash my metaphoric bicuspids in awful envy.” By the time Everymagazine had been produced and the great men of the Dutch Treat Club had had time to reflect on its im­ plications, John Reed was associated with a group of men and

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women who were interested in something more than markets. It had taken him two years to do it, but at last he was looking straight towards the future.

Mabel Dodge came home from Florence, where she had spent three years in expensively remaking a villa. “Remember, it is ugly in America,” she sobbed to her son. “We have left every­ thing worth while behind us. America is all machinery and money-making and factories—it is ugly, ugly, ugly!” But she decided to make the best of it. She devoted her energies and her showmanship to staging the famous exhibition that intro­ duced post-impressionist and- cubist art to America, and, in her home at 23 Fifth Avenue, she created a salon, to which artists, actors, anarchists, Socialists, I.W.W.’s, celebrities, eccentrics, and nonentities came. Hutchins Hapgood, Arthur Lee, Andrew Dasburg, Marsden Hartley,. Lee Simonson, Lincoln Steffens, Charles Demuth, Jo Davidson, Helen Westley, Emma Goldman, they all were her guests. There was food and drink and ciga­ rettes, and sometimes lively arguments, and always there was Mabel Dodge, possessive, adroit, sensitive. Of course John Reed went to Mabel Dodge’s. Half of the editors of the Masses and all the members of the Liberal Club were regular attendants. He went and enjoyed the show. His life had become almost as full as it had been at Harvard. There was his paid work at the American and his volunteer work on the Masses. He had written a three-act play and had a novel in hand. He was called upon at regular intervals to try to straighten out the financial difficulties of the Reeds and Greens. In the early spring he and Bobby Jones took a walking trip, and, being caught in the rain, found shelter in an empty house. Reported by neighbors to the police, they were saved from jail only be­ cause Reed remembered that an old Portland friend, Benjamin Wistar Morris, the architect, lived nearby. In such a life an evening at Mabel Dodge’s was only an in­ cident. But then one night Big Bill Haywood was there and talked about the Paterson strike, telling why the silk-workers had gone out, and what had happened to them. Reed liked the calm and unaffected way he talked to the strange gathering of

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society women and Bohemians. This was the candor, the in­ souciance, John Reed admired. He wanted to see Haywood in action, and he wanted to see the strike. He went to Paterson early in the morning of April 28. It was cold, and there was a light rain. At first the streets were empty, but a score of policemen soon appeared. Workers began to gather on the porches of the company houses that lined the street across from the mill. To escape the rain Reed went onto one of the porches, and used the excuse to begin talking with the three or four men who were standing there. He was amazed at the calmness with which people went about the eating of breakfast. Policemen broke up a group of men who had taken shelter under the canopy of a saloon. Two detectives arrested a striker, and there was some booing. Some boys yelled at the detectives, and a policeman kicked them. An officer came to the porch on which Reed was standing and ordered the men to disperse. They said that they lived in the house, and the officer, order­ ing them to get inside, turned to Reed and told him to move on. Reed informed Officer McCormick that he was there by permission of the occupants and had a right to stay there. “Never mind,” said the officer. “Do what I tell you. Come off of there, and come off damn quick.” Reed said that he wouldn’t. McCormick seized him by the arm, and jerked him to the sidewalk, where another policeman took his other arm. “Now you get to hell off this street,” he said. “I won’t get off this street or any other street,” Reed an­ swered. “If I’m breaking àny law, you arrest me.” McCormick didn’t want to arrest him, and said so profanely. As politely as he could, Reed said, “I’ve got your number. Now will you give me your name?” “Yes,” McCormick bellowed, “and I’ve got your number. I’ll arrest you.” Reed was taken to the jail and put in a cell, about four feet by seven, in which eight pickets had recently been kept for twenty-four hours without food or water. In a few minutes forty pickets were brought into the jail, and Reed could hear

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them singing and cheering. Before long he was led into the court of Recorder Carroll, a man “with the intelligent, cruel, merciless face of the ordinary police court magistrate.” He was permitted to tell his own story, and then McCormick recited a tale that, Reed felt, he was by no means smart enough to have invented himself. Carroll asked Reed his occupation. “Poet,” said Reed. “Twenty days,” said Carroll. Carlo Tresca, the fiery Italian strike-leader was in one of the cells of the Passaic County jail, and was explaining the class struggle to his Negro cellmate, when John Reed was brought in. He was so obviously respectable that Tresca was suspicious. He told Reed who he was, but he would not respond to the warm greeting with which the stranger hailed the name of Tresca. When Reed persisted in asking questions about the strike, Tresca’s suspicions were confirmed, and he refused to talk. The three of them spent the night in bewilderment and hostility, Reed lying awake and smoking one cigarette after another. The next morning Bill Haywood, who had been arrested and was being held without any charge, discovered Reed, thought he was there as a reporter, and asked him what his assignment was. He was amused and pleased when he learned the truth, and he took Reed around to introduce him to the strikers, in­ cluding the apologetic Tresca. Quinlan, Haywood, and Tresca were all in jail at the time, and there were some fifty strikers. Reed was particularly interested in the silk-workers, but he did not fail to study the normal functions of a county jail—“a place,” he wrote, “that takes in weak men and turns them out weaker.” The food was worse than that on the Bostonian: the bread stale and soggy; the salt and pepper boxes full of insects; the soup rank with decayed vegetables, spoiled meat, and dead vermin. (“You just gotta be careful they don’t get in your spoon,” the prisoners told him.) Fourteen hours out of every twenty-four were spent in the verminous cell, and there was no escape from the noise of the prison or from the stench of the open toilets. Except for the strikers, the men in the jail seemed hopelessly

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debauched. There were men who, reduced to begging, had been sentenced to six months or a year for first offenses. An insane man and a man far advanced in venereal disease were locked up with the others. An idiot boy of eighteen was kept in the jail after his father’s arrest because nobody knew what to do with him. A normal, intelligent boy of seventeen, who had been convicted of stealing a bicycle, was associating with con­ firmed criminals. Many of them were sick men, and the treat­ ment the doctor gave, on his rare visits, was farcical. Crap games and cockroach races were the chief forms of amusement. The guards and the trustees were eager to be bribed, and men with a little cash could get whatever they wanted, from decent food to cocaine. It would have been wholly depressing if it had not been for the silk-workers, who, in their variety of languages, educated John Reed in the events of the strike. It was the second strike in two years, and it had been going on for more than two months when Reed heard Haywood talking about it at Mabel Dodge’s. Within two weeks after the strike call, more than twenty thou­ sand men and women were out. The picket lines stood firm in the face of organized terror. There were daily arrests; picket lines were charged and strikers clubbed. On April 19 Valentine Modestino was shot, and fifteen thousand strikers attended his funeral. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, fresh from the victories of Lawrence, stirred the workers of Paterson to passionate loyalty and indomitable courage. Haywood’s calm, masterful leadership gave them confidence. When school-teachers spoke against the strike, the children picketed the schools. The leaders were ar­ rested again and again, but the picket lines stood firm. Reed was in jail only four days. The New York papers made more fuss about one reporter, Police Captain McBride said bit­ terly, than they had about the scores of strikers he had jailed. Robert Rogers, writing with condescending humor to Edward Hunt, was, for all his facetiousness, quite accurate in saying that the judge was a fool and that Reed would be twenty times the menace to Paterson law and order he had been before he was arrested. Hunt, in the meantime, was not only looking out for Reed’s comfort in the matter of food and cigarettes; he was

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working for his release. Somewhat regretfully, John Reed left Sheriff Radcliff’s hotel. He had been there long enough to learn a great deal. He really saw and felt what for a long time he had theoretically known: “that the manufacturers get all they can out of labor, pay as little as they must, and permit the existence of great masses of unemployed in order to keep wages down; that the forces of the state are on the side of property against the prop­ ertyless.” He also intensified his feeling that the Socialist Party was “duller than religion and almost as little in touch with labor.” When an Italian weaver wanted to know why the Social­ ists were not helping in the Paterson strike, Reed, already a parti­ san, told him that “a good share of the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor have forgotten all about the class struggle, and seem to be playing a little game with capitalistic rules, called ‘Button, button, who’s got the vote?’ ” Most important of all, he discovered the gayety and courage and fineness of militant workers. “When it came time for me to go out,” he wrote, “I said good-bye to all those gentle, alert, brave men, ennobled by something greater than themselves. They were the strike—not Bill Haywood, not Gurley Flynn, not any other individual. And if they should lose all their lead­ ers, other leaders would arise from the ranks, even as they rose, and the strike would go on! Think of it! Twelve years they have been losing strikes—twelve solid years of disappointments and incalculable suffering. They must not lose again.” Reed could think of nothing but Paterson. Though he was as yet a hesitant and embarrassed public speaker, he addressed meet­ ings on behalf of the strike. He not only went again and again to Paterson, but he insisted on his friends’ going—Mabel Dodge and Hunt and Bobby Jones and Walter Lippmann. Haywood got him to speak to the strikers. He found, however, that there was something he could do that was more effective than speak­ ing: he could teach them to sing. With all the tricks he had learned as cheer-leader, and with the perfect self-abandonment of which he was capable, he led them in singing their own songs, and he taught them new songs, Harvard songs with Paterson

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words. He took particular pleasure in teaching them the song that the Institute of 1776 had adopted as its own. It had origi­ nated, he discovered, in the French revolution, and it tickled him to be giving it back, after the snobs had had it for more than a century, to the people* to whom it belonged. Sometimes as many as thirty thousand people would follow Reed in shouting out “The Marseillaise” or “Solidarity Forever.” They loved the singing, these warm-blooded men of Paterson, and they loved John Reed. One Italian said to him, “You make us to be happy.” He could talk of nothing but the strike. When F. P. A. had lunch with him, our own Samuel Pepys recorded: “He told me how great a man is Bill Haywood, and it may be as Jack saith. Also he told me that the Industrial Workers of the World are sorely misjudged and that the tayles in the publick prints of their blood-thirstiness are lies-told by the scriveners. And out of it all I wish I did know how to appraise what is true and what is false, but I am too ignorant, and ill-fitted to judge truly.” Reed wanted to do more than talk. Police terror was becom­ ing fiercer. During a striker’s trial one girl in the audience was given sixty days for smiling, and another thirty days for gasping at the sentence. There were more and more heads battered, more and more arrests, longer and longer sentences. At last, in the middle of May, the idea of the Paterson pageant was bom. Percy MacKaye, whose experience with pageants Reed respected, en­ thusiastically urged him to go ahead. For three weeks Reed worked at nothing else, sleeping little and then with his clothes on. The leaders were divided: Hay­ wood favored the plan, but Tresca at first thought it was im­ possible. The strikers were delighted. Reed met with a large group of them, and, though they spoke at least a dozen differ­ ent languages, managed to understand and be understood. Out of a single sentence came the theme of the pageant: “We were frightened when we went in,” said one of the girls, describing the first day of the strike, “but we were singing when we came out.” Out of other such hints the pageant grew. Reed plunged back and forth between Paterson and New York. In Paterson the rehearsals promised success. Responding

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to Reed’s enthusiasm, the strikers evolved the details of each scene, lost their self-consciousness, and felt themselves re-enact­ ing the stirring events of their own drama. In New York plans moved too slowly. Mabel Dodge, Jessie Ashley, Hutchins Hapgood, Edward Hunt, Ernest Poole, and others set about the raising of funds, but only enough could be secured to rent Madison Square Garden for one night. They did what they could, but preparations were slow. Reed, paying little attention to practical details, concentrated on plans for production. Bobby Jones was drafted to design the scenery, a panorama of Paterson factories, and he did a poster of a crouched, shouting, challenging workman that was to ap­ pear year after year on I.W.W. publications. A runway was built so that the strikers could march on and off the platform. On the afternoon of June 7, a thousand strikers were brought to New York for the final rehearsal. New York was tense. The cry of sabotage had been raised against the I.W.W., and the newspapers were raging against what Sheriff Julius Harburger called “sedition, treasonable ut­ terances, un-American doctrines, advocating sabotage, fulmina­ tion of paranoiacal ebullitions, inflammatory, hysterical unsound doctrines.” Harburger sat in a box near the stage. He wanted to forbid the playing of “The Marseillaise,” but, as he regretfully told reporters, a judge had ruled that it was legal. He had to content himself with declaring, “Just let anybody say one word of disrespect to the flag, and I will stop the show so quickly it will take their breath away.” An hour before the pageant began, the streets on every side of the Garden were full. The cheaper seats were all taken, but the rows that were priced at a dollar or two dollars a seat were largely vacant. A hurried conference decided that the crowd would be admitted at a quarter apiece. It was nearly an hour, filled with the shouting of sellers of pamphlets and the confusion of the entering crowd, before the pageant could begin. “The pageant,” said the program, “represents a battle between the working class and the capitalist class conducted by the In­ dustrial Workers of the World. ... It is a conflict between two social forces.” The first scene showed the mills at six o’clock

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on a February morning. The mill whistle sounded the call to work. Bent and shivering, the workers entered the mills, and the sound of the looms began. Then there was silence, followed by the mounting passion of “The Marseillaise” as the striking workers marched from the factories. In a second episode brutal police clubbed pickets, and Modestino was hit by a hired gun­ man’s bullet. At Modestino’s funeral, after the strikers placed evergreen twigs and red carnations upon his coffin, Flynn, Tresca, and Haywood spoke. A great mass meeting at Haledon and a May Day procession followed. The hungry strikers sent their children away to be cared for by the workers of other cities. Finally the strikers shouted their support for Haywood’s demand for an eight-hour day and sang “The Internationale.” The audience, many of whom had wept at the funeral of Modestino, rose and sang with the strikers. It was, to a greater extent than any one had anticipated, a workers’ audience, and they went out from the Garden with a new faith in themselves and their class. The intellectuals saw visions. Susan Glaspell dreamed of what the theatre might be. Hutchins Hapgood felt the promise of a new order in which “self-expression in in­ dustry and art among the masses may become a rich reality, spreading a human glow over the whole of humanity,” an order “from which we shall all be gainers—in real life, in justice, in art, in love.” Even the reporters were impressed, and the next day’s papers spoke of the pageant with respect, though editorials sub­ sequently pointed out that it was produced “under the direction of a destructive organization opposed in spirit and antagonistic in action to all the forces which have upbuilded this republic,” and that its motive was *‘to inspire hatred, to induce violence which may lead to the tearing down of the civil state and the institution of anarchy.” Only the thousands in Paterson were disappointed, for, three weeks later, Jessie Ashley and Fred Boyd made their report and announced, not the huge profit that everyone who had seen the crowd in the Garden expected, but a deficit. Profits can not be made from single performances when scenery costs hundreds of dollars and other expenses are in proportion. But the strikers could think only of the dwindled funds that the pageant should

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have replenished. What Paterson had lost the working class had gained, but that could not be apparent to men and women enter­ ing the fifth month of a bitter, bloody strike.

John Reed, at the time when the Paterson strikers learned the truth, was on his way to Europe. A month after the pageant he was irritating Gertrude Stein by telling her stories about witches in Spain which she, having spent months in Spain, did not like and did not believe. A fortnight later he, Robert Jones, and Carl Van Vechten—Mabel Dodge’s jeunes gens assortis, in Miss Stein’s phrase—were domiciled among the grandeurs of the Villa Curonia in Florence. ' • Paterson seemed to be merely an episode in an active life. The pageant was something to be talked about with Gordon Craig and other visitors at the villa. Muriel and Paul Draper arrived one evening with Arthur Rubinstein and John McMul­ lin. There were triangular arguments between Mrs. Draper, Jones, and Van Vechten about painting. Van Vechten quarreled with Rubinstein and Mrs. Draper about Bach. John Reed, hitch­ ing up his pants and impatiently pawing curly hair, called them all fools. Mabel Dodge sat quietly, missed nothing, enjoyed everything. There was a ghost: “It doesn’t appear or anything. It simply smothers you. You wake up suffocating, and always almost out of bed. The story is a simple one. It was an Italian woman who died there, and who loved the place and Mabel Dodge, so that she doesn’t want any one else to stay. We weren’t told anything specific about it. But afterward, we found out that lots of people had been actually driven away by it. And all had the same symptoms. So tonight we had a couple of priests down from the monastery on the nearby hill, with acolytes and censers, and little horse-hair rattles to sprinkle holy water with, and they put on their vestments and went through the service of Exor­ cism of Devils, parading through the house, chanting, intoning, and carrying on like all get out.” He loved the villa, “an ancient Medici affair, with contours supposed to be by Michel Angelo, and a great courtyard by Brunnelleschi.” Living there, overlooking all Florence and the

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whole Amo valley, he felt “like the fisherman caught up by the genie’s daughter and carried to the mountain-top.” The room in which he slept was hung with strips of crimson damask, edged with gold, which came from an old church in Venice, and there were great fourteenth century armoires reaching to the ceiling. From the terrace on which it opened, he could look out over cypresses and oleanders and grapevines and olive trees to the rolling Tuscan hills, and could hear a peasant on the road to Siena singing “a song that must have come out of the East with the Etrurians before Rome.” When Mabel Dodge organized a motor trip, and they visited the old towns to the south of Florence, sleeping one night in a monastery on a bleak mountain and the next upon the shore of Lake Trasimeno, he was excited by the palaces, delicate but barbaric, of Siena, by the high towers of San Gianiguano and its view over vineyards and mountains, by the Sodoma frescoes at Monte Olivetto and the Giottos at Assisi. Each town as he came to it seemed to him the perfect place in which to live. And back in Florence there was swimming every day in a tank at the Villa Bombichi. Always a place to swim meant hap­ piness for Reed, but this was a tank built by Michel Angelo, set in an olive grove and backed by a hill of cypresses. Swim­ ming and talk—and Mabel Dodge kept the house full of “smart, clever, hard Londoners, very raffiné and effete,” and the flower of “ultra-modem, ultra-civilized Continental society.” She took care that each of the visitors heard about the pageant and read The Day in Bohemia. She knew not only how to capture lions but also how to show them off. Mabel Dodge had become rather more than John Reed’s benefactress. She attracted him as she had attracted and was to at­ tract many other men. She, too, had revolted against the deathly dreariness of the bourgeoisie. She, too, wanted life, though, as he was to discover, she wanted it only for herself. Her im­ movable calm and her kind of naive wilfulness seemed soft and feminine, but she was ruthless and could be terribly exacting. She liked John Reed because he was alive. “I have never known a great man or woman,” she wrote, after she had known many, “who did not first of all give one a feeling of realness, true

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livingness.” Her fondness for Reed flattered him. She was experi­ enced enough so that her affection could be construed as a tribute to his virility, as it was undoubtedly a tribute to the promise of genius. Flattered and fascinated, Reed was perfectly willing to have her for his guide into a world of new experience, of which Italy was merely the geographical locale. “I never was so happy in my life,” he wrote Hunt. And yet, having heard from Hunt how much disappointment the finan­ cial failure of the pageant had brought and how that failure had been used to attack the I.W.W. and weaken its leadership of the strike, he felt, he said, like a coward. He had known that he was running away. There were not merely the details of the pageant; there was the strike itself. When he led the singing for the last time, the strikers had said, “We been so lonesome for to sing—you come tomorrow?” And there was a sense of disloyalty to his family as well, for Harry had had to settle down to a dull, routine job, and Mrs. Reed was struggling with the dreary tangle of dubious assets and unmistakable liabilities. But Reed had had to go. More was at stake than the glamor of Italy. “I’m really tired,” he wrote his mother, “for the first time in my life, and I know I can do finer work if I can rest.” Of course he was tired, after the three breathless weeks of preparation for the pageant, but not merely tired. What he felt, perhaps none too clearly, was that he was being impelled to make a choice. He had been attracted to Bill Haywood, Gurley Flynn, and Carlo Tresca: “I liked their understanding of the workers, their revolutionary thought, the boldness of their dream, the way immense crowds of people took fire and came alive under their leadership. Here was drama, change, democ­ racy on the march made visible.” He could not forget “the exultant men who had blithely defied the lawless brutality of the city government and gone to prison laughing and singing.” It was by no means the first time that he had become conscious of injustice, but he had never known how intense the struggle against injustice could be and how great the stakes. He had felt the beauty and glory of that struggle, and had seen that he was fitted for a part in it. After the pageant it seemed inevi­ table that he should be drawn into it further and further.

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He was not afraid. What made him hesitate was the recogni­ tion that any commitment sheared away some part of life’s pos­ sibilities. He wanted to hold to everything that he had found good. It was typical of him that, in the fortnight between the pageant and his sailing for Italy, he was not too busy or too tired to attend the triennial reunion of the class of 1910. When he wrote his mother that he was not tying up with the I.W.W, he was, of course, trying to reassure a conventional, harassed, aspiring woman of the middle class, but the reasons he gave her were the reasons he gave himself: “I am not a Socialist temper­ amentally any more than I’m an Episcopalian. I know now that my business is to interpret and live Life, wherever it may be found—whether in the labor movement or out of it. I haven’t ever been patient with cliques any more than Paw was, and I won’t be roped in, any more than he was, in some petty gang with a platform.” The problem was many-sided. Bobby Rogers wrote him, “Cut out the quick-lunch, emotionally effective propaganda dope, such as the jail story in the Masses. You can either do that, or you can try to do literature without strings tied to it. The latter for the sake of art, or the first for the sake of Big Bill. You can’t do both.” Reed could not foresee that Rogers, hav­ ing won notoriety by advising his students at Massachusetts In­ stitute of Technology to be snobs and marry their bosses’ daughters, would do his “literature without strings tied to it” for a Hearst newspaper. What he did realize was that all he had ever said about art for art’s sake, in revolt against the kind of literature that propagandized for bourgeois morality and cap­ italist economics, coulcT be applied to literature that propa­ gandized for proletarian justice and I.W.W. principles. He felt there was a difference, but he could not define it. Definition was never his way of solving any problem. Intel­ lectual analysis might have saved him long delays, much con­ fusion, and some unhappiness; on the other hand, it might have betrayed him. In any case he was both incapable and scornful of rational solutions. He had an opportunity to go to Italy, and he went. Except on one occasion, when he walked into a Socialist meeting and presented the greetings of the American

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Socialist movement—“Signor Reed, a tall, robust, and blond youth, completely won the sympathies of the audience”—he thought little about the labor movement. He took what the moment gave, with confidence that, when the moment was over, he would know what he wanted to do. At the end of the summer he and Robert Jones, who was bound for Germany to study under Max Reinhardt, started on a walk­ ing-trip. At some point they discovered an old cistern, thick with green scum, which local legend associated with Leonardo da Vinci. Reed plunged in. There or elsewhere he caught diph­ theria. He recovered rapidly, and in the middle of September sailed for America.

VII The Romantic Revolution

genie’s daughter brought Reed back from the castle on the mountain-top. He had given up his job on the Ameri­ can when he went to Italy, and now, in October, 1913, he became managing editor of the Masses. The cartoons and pic tures were becoming better and better. To Young, Sloan, and Becker had been added K. R. Chamberlain, George Bellows, Glenn Coleman, and Stuart Davis. They drew the life of New York that John Reed had learned to love: crowded streets, night courts, Coney Island, the markets, saloons, and alleys. Young, always thrusting at capitalism, had provoked a libel suit by the Associated Press with his cartoon, “Poisoned at the Source.” Sloan did a devastating back cover on the Binghamton factory fire. Other artists attacked the evils of capitalism or satirized the absurdity of middle-class pretensions. But for the most part they were discoverers, awakening, just as John Reed had awakened, to the rich variety of Manhattan, never indiffer­ ent to the injustice and cruelty that were part of that variety, but equally excited by t^e fate of a political prisoner, the woes of a prostitute, and the misadventures of rowdy boys. Reed’s own contribution reflected as catholic a taste as the drawings. He wrote a simple, restrained sonnet on a farmer’s woman, and the editors of the Masses, in the midst of political upheavals and economic warfare, devoted a full page to the poem and the drawing by Sloan that accompanied it. He satirized philanthropy in “Another Case of Ingratitude.” He wrote a oneact played called “Moondown” about the romantic dreams of working girls. Whatever he found that was fresh and alive was material for the Masses. he

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The sense of discovery was everywhere, and it was always joined, though sometimes by fragile ties, to the spirit of protest. Henrietta Rodman, a high school teacher, had fostered the Lib­ eral Club to give some sort of unity to the diverse expressions of the new insurgency. She knew teachers, sèttlement workers, and Socialists, as well as artists, poets, and hoboes. When the Liberal Club and Polly Holladay’s restaurant were established in the same building on Macdougal Street, the Village had not merely a social but an intellectual center. Newcomers, such as Floyd Dell or Alfred Kreymborg, could meet the giants of the Village, Horace Träubel or Thomas Seltzer or, if he happened to be in town, Big Bill Haywood. And they could readily find their places in the turbulent activity that grew out of the surging rush of emotions and ideas. To the new arrivals in the Village, Jack Reed, already a legend­ ary figure at twenty-six, seemed a thoroughgoing radical. And, by the standards of the Village, he was. He was contemptuous of organized religion, the institution of marriage, and what is called law and order. His sympathies were on the side of labor. He was romantic, but not sentimental. He was gallant, even reckless, but he could count the cost of recklessness, and he never complained at having to pay the price. And radicalism was beginning to go a little deeper. He had not forgotten his friends of the Paterson strike. In particular there was F. Sumner Boyd, under indictment in Paterson for violating New Jersey’s anarchy statutes. Boyd was an English­ man and the son of radicals. His first memories were of the refugees from the Continent who stayed for days or weeks in his parents’ home. He became a Socialist, a street speaker, an organizer of the unemployed. He led demonstrations, and went as a delegate to the International Socialist Congress in Copen­ hagen. In 1910 he came to America. The Socialists he met seemed dry and professorial or suave and opportunistic, but from the first he liked Bill Haywood as a person, and during the Lawrence strike he accepted his principles and became a mem­ ber of the LW.W. Thus it happened that he was called into the Paterson strike when Haywood was arrested, and in its bitterest days delivered a speech on sabotage.

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Boyd was perhaps the first thoroughly informed Marxist Reed had known. Though he was only two years older than Reed, he had been brought up in the radical movement, had been an active revolutionary for more than a decade, and had read and re-read the classics of Marxism. They had met at strike head­ quarters in Paterson, had liked each other, and had worked to­ gether on the pageant. Soon after Reed left for Italy, Boyd was arrested, and was awaiting trial when Reed returned. He had at first supported himself in this country by radical journalism, but his connection with the I.W.W. had ended all possibility of employment by Socialist papers. Reed found work for him, and they were constantly together. Boyd was poet enough to appre­ ciate Reed; Reed was radical enough to appreciate Boyd. Mabel Dodge did not like Boyd. In fact, she liked only those friends of Reed’s who would submit to her domination or add to her glory. Reed found her demands a little trying. When he wanted to explore the East Side, she would propose that they go together in her limousine. If he neglected her for the Masses or the Liberal Club or for other friends, she might threaten to take poison, and at least once she took it. As on a similar occasion in Italy, the dose proved less than fatal, but the incident was rather embarrassing for Reed. He ran away in desperation to Boston and Cambridge, leaving Hapgood and Steffens to cope with Mrs. Dodge’s hysteria. But he had to return, and nothing had been accomplished. The whole situation was distressingly complicated. The flight to Italy had solved no problems. The demands of radicalism, so eloquently presented by Çoyd, clashed just as relentlessly as ever with the poet’s craving for all experience. The defeat of the Paterson strikers and the consequent weakening of the I.W.W. robbed him of the satisfaction he had taken in the pageant. For both financial and temperamental reasons, the managing editor­ ship of the Masses could only temporarily serve his purposes. It was a satisfaction to bring out such an issue as the one that cele­ brated Christmas, with its coruscating cartoons against religion, but Reed knew that he had little executive ability, and he could not contemplate an indefinite future as Max Eastman’s right­ hand man. He was depressed, though his friends seldom sus-

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peered it. He had lost confidence in himself and in the convic­ tions he had arrived at. So far as he could see, he had reached an impasse. Suddenly a way opened for him. Francisco Villa, crossing the border from El Paso in March of 1913, had raised an army in his native mountains, and driven the Federal troops from Jiminez and Torreon. With the capture of Chihuahua City in Novem­ ber, and his sudden raid on Juarez, he became the sensation of the American press, and the war-correspondents rushed down into Mexico. The MetropQlitan asked Reed to go. He had done two articles for the magazine; Carl Hovey, managing editor, had been a pupil of Copey’s; Lincoln Steffens said he could do the job. The Metropolitan, changing owners in 1912, turned to So­ cialism as, a decade earlier, McClure's and Everybody's had turned to muckraking. Like its muckraking predecessors, it gave most of its space to fiction, and the generous subsidy of Harry Payne Whitney permitted it to publish works by Rudyard Kip­ ling, Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, Booth Tarkington, Rupert Hughes, Fannie Hurst, and a good many others whose names sold copies on the newsstands. At the same time, it sought the intellectual prestige of the new radicalism. George Herron, vic­ tim of a famous academic scandal, Walter Lippmann, and Mor­ ris Hillquit expounded Socialism. Frederic C. Howe wrote on the labor movement abroad, Israel Zangwill on the militant suf­ fragists of England, Bernard Shaw on equality, Lincoln Steffens on corruption. The wiser radicals were skeptical and amused, but they were bound to feel that, when hard-boiled editors backed by a sporting millionaire took up Socialism, the move­ ment was growing. The editors suggested that Reed would have more prestige in Mexico, as well as greater profit, if he could also act as the rep­ resentative of a daily newspaper. The Tribune, he discovered, was sending Richard Harding Davis. He hurried to the Sun, where Don Marquis, whom he had known as a friend of Robert Rogers’, was working. Reed’s necktie was untied, his shoe­ strings flapping, his hair uncombed. Marquis took him to see the

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owner, a fat little man, conventional and smug, who shrank be­ hind his desk as if he expected a bomb to be thrown, and barked out a refusal. Finally the World gave Reed the assignment he desired. Three days later he was at the border. At Presidio, on the American side of the Rio Grande, he climbed to the flat mud roof of the post office and looked across low scrub and the shal­ low yellow river to Ojinaga, headquarters of Mercado’s beaten army. General Orozco had forbidden reporters to enter the Mexican city, but Reed waded across the river and found Mer­ cado, who blubbered and blustered about his defeat. The houses of the town, which had been lost and taken five times, were roofless and the walls riddled. Along the main street hordes of sick and starving people passed, driven from the interior by fear of the approaching rebels. Refugees poured across the river, challenged by rude inspectors. Asked what she carried beneath her voluminous shawl, one woman placidly answered, “I don’t know, senor. It may be a girl, or it may be a boy.” Presidio, with its dozen adobe shacks and its two-story frame store, was overrun with war-correspondents, secret agents of both armies, representatives of American interests, drummers for munition companies, and rangers, sheriffs, cow-punchers, and customs officials. The store-keeper spent half his time profitably outfitting refugees and supplying provisions to the Federal army, and the other half trying to protect his three daughters from amorous Mexicans and cowboys. An agent for a portrait com­ pany was getting thousands of orders for colored enlargements from photographs. The Hjgh Sheriff of Presidio County periodi­ cally bustled into town with a revolver on each hip, a knife in his left boot, and a shotgun over his saddle. Then there was “Doc,” who played Wagner and Beethoven on a castrated melo­ deon, charged twenty-five cents for setting a limb or delivering a child, was always drunk, and dimly remembered days in London with Frederick Watts and William Morris. Up the river to El Paso Reed went, and again there were cor­ respondents and agents and salesmen. Across the river, at Juarez, he had his first sight of the Constitutionalist army—two thousand horsemen and five hundred infantry, most of them wearing blue

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denim suits but a few in khaki, each of them with a brightcolored handkerchief about his neck and a gay sarape on his saddle. The general arrived: “Two thousand nondescript, tat­ tered men, on dirty little tough horses, their sarapes flying out behind, their mouths one wild yell, simply flung themselves out over the plain. That’s how the general reviewed them.” Already Reed was taking sides: “These were wild men, well fed, clothed, armed, and mounted, volunteers instead of conscripts like the Fédérais. A great bunch, believe me.” “What pageant material!” he added. On Christmas Day he was at Villa’s headquarters in Chihua­ hua, in the middle of a brown, savage desert, with great jagged mountains in the distance. “More wonderful than Italy,” he thought, as he saw the mosque-like white churches and the soft yellow-brown cathedral, with its arabesques and its primitive angels and popes. He followed Villa to the opera house. Thou­ sands of people stood along the street shouting “Viva Villa.” Bands played, and the theatre, into which women and children poured, was gay with Mexican flags and colors in bunting and lights. Villa called the children to the platform in a long line, and gave each a suit of clothes and a dollar and a half in the new currency. Reed noticed that more than once, as the ragged children passed before him, there were tears in Villa’s eyes. The next morning Reed was taken into Villa’s room by his private secretary before the general arrived. Soon there was a fanfare of bugles outside, and a fairly tall, thick-set man in a brown suit entered, followed by a throng of peons. The room was with difficulty cleared, and Villa sat down at his desk. Benavides, his secretary, read his letters, and he swiftly dictated his answers. Then there was a conference with Terrazas, Secre­ tary of State. Meanwhile Reed watched. Villa’s movements, it seemed to him, were like an animal’s. When he stood up, he was awkward and stiff below the knees, from much horseback riding. Above the waist, with hands and arms and trunk, he moved with the sureness and swiftness of a coyote. His mouth hung open, and his face seemed good-natured, almost simple. Only his eyes, dark, perfectly round, and steely, were terrible. When he had finished his work, Villa turned to Reed, and the

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first of a score of interviews began. The stories, circulated by the Metropolitan, of Villa’s deep affection for Reed, and of his making him a Brigadier General, Reed took pains to deny. “It is not true,” he wrote, “that ‘a remarkable friendship’ existed be­ tween General Villa and myself. I doubt if I should even call it a friendship.” Nevertheless, Villa, who was capable of dismiss­ ing newspaper men without ceremony, did permit Reed to accompany him about the city, to spend hours in his office, and, two months later, to go with him into battle. As for Reed, though he stood in awe of Villa—“He is a terrible man”—he be­ came his staunchest supporter in the American press. He was attracted to Villa by his romantic story. He had heard all the legends: of the government official murdered in revenge, of the raids on rich bacendados, of the distribution of spoils among the peons. He knew the ballads of reckless and romantic bravery that had grown up around the Mexican Robin Hood, “the friend of the poor.” He had read of Villa’s loyal support of Madero in 1910, and he had been told by Fédérais and Constitu­ tionalists alike of the incredible campaign that, in eight months, had given Villa control of Chihuahua and most of northern Mexico. Moreover, Villa was democratic. One day, as a troop train stood on a siding in Chihuahua, loading men and cannon and supplies, Reed noticed the general, his brown suit dirty, his shirt open at the neck, driving mules into a car. The sweat poured down his face as he cursed and kicked the balking animals on the narrow gangplank. Finally, when the car was loaded and the doors closed, he turned to

Who that hath known thee but shall burn In exile till he come again To do thy bitter will, O stem Moon of the tides of men!

But he went back to Whitman to tell of the city, the deep ex­ citement it always roused in him shining through, as it shone through in his essay, “Almost Thirty.” He spoke of Fifth Avenue, “Peacock Street, street of banners”; of Broadway, “gashing the city like a lava-stream”; of Greenwich Village, “battle-ground of all adolescent Utopias.” Like Whitman, he wanted the reader to know that he was part of all this:

In dim Roumanian wine-cellars I am not unwelcome, Pulsing with hot rhythm of scornful gypsy fiddlers . . . In Grand Street coffee-rooms, haunt of Yiddish philosophers, Novelists reading aloud a new chapter, collecting a dime from each auditor, Playwrights dramatizing the newspaper headlines, poets dumb to deaf America . . . Dear and familiar and unforgettable is the city As the face of my mother . . .

*

Have I omitted you, truck-quaking West Street, dingy Death Avenue, Gracious old Church of the Sea and Land, Inwood, tip of Man­ hattan, The rag shops of Minetta Lane, and the yelping swirl of the Broad Street Curb, Macdougal Alley, gilded squalor of fashionable artists, Coenties Slip, old sea-remembering notch at the back of down­ town? Nay, across the world, three thousand miles away, without map or guide-book,

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Ask me and I will describe them and their people, In all weathers, drunk or sober, by sun and moon . . . I have watched the summer day come up from the top of a pier of the Williamsburg Bridge, I have slept in a basket of squid at the Fulton Street Market, Talked about God with the old cockney woman who sells hot-dogs under the Elevated at South Ferry, Listened to the tales of dago dips in the family parlor of the Hell­ hole, And from the top gallery of the Metropolitan heard Didur sing “Boris Godounov.” Dear and familiar and ever-new to me is the city As the body of my lover . . .

All professions, races, temperaments, philosophies, All history, all possibilities, all romance, America ... the world ... !

Six months in revolutionary Russia—not predictably an expe­ rience to bring a poet to maturity. Yet “America, 1918,” begun in Petrograd, most of it written in Christiania, finished in New York, was as much a product of Reed’s participation in the Bol­ shevik revolution as was Ten Days That Shook the World. It was an affirmation of love of country, bom out of recognition that that country could be made worthy of love. Reed was returning with not merely the hope but the expectation that the United States would, in some not very distant time, follow Rus­ sia’s example. It would become a nation that he could respect and serve. He was no longer afraid of it, and the poem was the expression of hope and love. It was not the America of the future Reed sang but the America he had actually known. Like Whitman, he hailed the future in the present. The poetry of revolutionary struggle was yet to be written—and, as it happened, not by him. But he had conquered at last the confusions and reticences and false tradi­ tions that had circumscribed him. This was poetry in which the whole John Reed, and not some romantic fragment of him, lived and spoke.

XVII America, 1918

April 28, 1918, exactly five years after his arrest in Paterson, John Reed reached what the Times, with mili­ tary secretiveness, called in its dispatch “an Atlantic port.” The port was, of course, New York. Being under indi ment in the Masses case, he was met by federal agents, who held him on board for more than eight hours, while they searched his baggage and clothes. His papers were seized, but he was finally liberated after Morris Hillquit had promised that he would be at the Federal Building the next morning. Louise Bryant had waited for him from the time the boat docked, early in the morning, and together they went in a cab to the Brevoort. The next day he appeared before Judge Rufus E. Foster, with Dud­ ley Field Malone as his counsel, and bail was fixed at f 2000. It was a clear warning to John Reed that wartime America was no place for the writing of poetry; there were other things that had to be done first. A year of war had successfully infected the majority of the American people with hysteria. Day after day they had read in the papers that Germans were beasts who must be destroyed. Sunday after Sunday ministers of the gospel had preached the crusade. Moving pictures and plays portrayed the frightfulness of the enemy and the heroic idealism of the American soldier, and between the acts four-minute men con­ verted sentiment into cash. Education almost ceased that chil­ dren might listen to tales of Hun atrocities or participate in liberty loan, Red Cross, war saving stamp, or Y.M.C.A. cam­ paigns. It was no wonder that the slightest opposition to war roused n

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the crudest of passions. Many of Reed’s friends had suffered. Conscientious objectors were beaten, set at exhausting labor, and underfed. Wobblies had been mobbed, tarred and feathered, lynched. Pacifist preachers had been driven from their parishes, some with whips and clubs. Persons of remotely German parent­ age were suspected of espionage and subjected to the machina­ tions of amateur detectives as well as the jeers of self-righteous patriots. Workmen who refused to buy liberty bonds lost their jobs and found themselves blacklisted. Mild critics of the war had their houses splashed with yellow paint, and were forced by frenzied vigilantes to kiss the flag. Madness was not even chastened, as it had long since been in Europe, by the somber thought of death, for American casualties had only been suffi­ cient to titillate popular passions. Insanity prevailed, and war­ profits grew. Reed had left Russia with every intention of arriving in time for the Masses trial, but Mr. Sisson and the State Department had interfered. The trial began on April 15, and the day before Reed reached New York the prisoners were freed by a hung jury. Eastman, Dell, Merrill Rogers, Art Young, Josephine Bell, Glintenkamp, and Reed, together with the Masses Publishing Company, had been charged with conspiring to promote insub­ ordination and mutiny in the military and naval forces of the United States and to obstruct recruiting and enlistment to the injury of the service. The first part of the indictment was quashed by Judge Hand, but the second stood. Reed could, of course, understand why the government would not permit criticism of its conduct. What amazed him was the tremendous effort that was made to preserve the fiction of legal­ ity. All the ingenuity of the prosecution, he discovered, had been devoted to an attempt to prove that the editors had quite literally conspired, had got together one day and said, “Go to, now, we will obstruct recruiting and enlistment to the injury of the serv­ ice.” The fantastic nature of the case was underscored by the fact that he personally had been indicted for the simple head­ line he had put over a clipping from the Herald, “Knit a StraitJacket for Your Soldier Boy.” For ten days the legal battle had

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gone on; for two days the jurors had argued; and then, on April 27, the jury had been discharged and the first Masses trial ended. As soon as he had an opportunity to look about him, what im­ pressed Reed, next to the prevalence of hysteria, was the interest in Russia. In spite of the'patriotic indignation that had been whipped up when the Brest-Litovsk treaty was signed, in spite of the legend that all radicals and Bolsheviki in particular were German spies, people wanted to know what had happened. His first statement, published in the Call on May 1, emphasized the fight of the Bolsheviks against German as well as Russian im­ perialism. He followed it with a statement in the Liberator, dis­ posing of current myths about Bolshevik terrorism and briefly describing the aims of the Soviet regime. He ended with an ac­ count of what the revolution had taught him: “That in the last analysis the property-owning class is loyal only to its own prop­ erty. That the property-owning class will never readily com­ promise with the working class. That the masses of the workers are not only capable of great dreams but have in them the power to make dreams come true.” But Reed soon found that written messages were not enough. People were demanding to hear him speak. As soon as his legal status was clarified—his papers were held but he was released, his appearance at the second Masses trial having been secured by bail—he began his long series of speeches. He spoke first at the meeting, held on May 9, to celebrate the end of the Masses trial. The next night, with Hillquit and Santeri Nuorteva, at the time representative of the Finnish People’s Republic, he spoke at a mass meeting on behalf of free Finland. A week later, after a vain trip to Washington to try to secure his papers, he addressed the James Connolly Socialist Club. On the eighteenth, in Carnegie Hall, he defended the Bolshevik attitude towards the moderate Socialists. His meeting at the Star Casino on the twenty-third filled the aisles and the window-sills. On the twenty-sixth he was guest of honor at a dinner for the Call. So it went, and it was not in New York alone that he was wanted. He spoke in Tremont Temple, Boston, with Harry Dana as chairman^ and kept an organized group of reactionaries, mostly Harvard students, in check with his humor and his solid

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marshaling of facts. On June i, he was scheduled to speak in Philadelphia, but, when he arrived, he learned that the permit had been revoked. He walked down to the hall and found five hundred persons outside the locked doors. Leading them to a quiet street, away from traffic, he began* to speak. Immediately a police lieutenant rushed up and kicked away the box on which he was standing. Reed protested that he was breaking no law, and that, if he was, he should be arrested. Two policemen took him to the station-house in a car. Meanwhile a Finnish shipyard worker named Kogerman was hit by a zealous policeman. When he wanted to know why he had been hit, the policemen gave him a thorough beating and arrested him. Kogerman was accused of assaulting four policemen, urging the crowd to rescue Reed, and resisting arrest. Reed was charged with disobeying a municipal ordinance, inciting to riot, and inciting to seditious remarks. Bail was fixed at $1500, but, at the request of a man from the district attorney’s office, was raised to $5000. The same amount was set for Kogerman, and Reed helped him to raise it. Trial was postponed till fall. One June 4 Reed spoke in the Bronx, on June 6 in Newark, on June 7 in Brooklyn. There were more than two thousand people in his audience at the Bronx, and he took off his coat, rolled up his blue shirt-sleeves, and talked to them for two hours. He described the shop-committees and the sabotage of the managers, told how the soviets worked, and gave examples of Bolshevik propaganda in the German army. At Newark, just as he was about to begin his address, the crowd rose and sang “The Marseillaise.” Reed cried “Long live the social revolution” in Russian. On the twelfth he was in Detroit. Moose Hall was filled with people, many of them Russians. James Couzens, recently made police commissioner, sat near the platform with the representa­ tives of the Department of Justice, and his officers were in every part of the hall. The meeting was subdued by such a display of force, but when Reed rose and began “Tovarischi,” the applause thundered forth. All evening the hallfull of people kept him there, in their eagerness to know what had happened in Russia. As the audience filed out, the police seized a hundred and fifty

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men and women, chosen more or less at random, and held them all night in a room of the Municipal Building with no sleeping accommodations and no toilet. Reed went home with Walter Nelson, who had presided at the meeting, and asked if >he might stay a day or two. He was tired and spent most of the time in sleeping. Despite the great crowds at his meetings, he felt, he told Nelson, that the majority of Americans, especially the native-born, did not catch the sig­ nificance of the revolution. It seemed to him that he must shake them out of their indifference, make them see that a new era of human history had begun. And, tired as he was, he hurried back to New York for another meeting, then to Worcester, and back to New York once more. Somehow the word must be carried to the American people. In the midst of all this, he tried to make plans for the future. His first task was, he knew, to tell the story of the revolution, and he kept hammering away at the State Department so that he might get his notes and documents and start work on his book. But in the meantime, there was the question of earning a living. He was usually paid for his speeches, but the income was neither large nor dependable. Louise Bryant had syndicated her articles, and put them in a book, Six Red Months in Russia, The paying magazines, however, were closed to Reed. Oswald Vil­ lard was warned that the Nation would be suppressed if it printed anything of Reed’s. Collier’s took a story, put it in type, and then sent it back. Here was the finest reporter in the coun­ try, with the biggest story in the world, and during the whole of 1918 and 1919 he published nothing in a non-radical maga­ zine except one brief article, “The Case for the Bolsheviki,” in the Independent. His fertile mind suggested many schemes, including a plan of doing movie scenarios. He had caught a glimpse of the propa­ ganda possibilities of the films, and the idea occurred to him that, if he could get some sort of post, he might support him­ self and at the same time lay the foundation for work that could some day be done. He went so far as to make an appointment

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with Willard Mack, head of Goldwyn’s scenario department, but the movies were not looking for radicals. Another plan was suggested by Frank Harris, who was editing Pearsoris. Harris, Reed, and Floyd Dell, Harris suggested, would found a new magazine, to be called These States. Reed was in­ terested enough to draw up a prospectus. The magazine, to con­ form with Burleson’s censorship, would have to be non-political, but it would be “the best expression of uncorrupted American artists.” Harris finally withdrew his support, and Reed was forced to realize that such a magazine was as impossible in a nation at war as his scheme of propaganda movies. Much of the time he felt distressingly lonely. Professor Cope­ land, whom he had seen on his trip to Boston, was friendly, but, as Reed said, “in a frame of mind that thinks no one is a heman who hasn’t gone into naval aviation.” Realizing how Copey felt, and genuinely eager to spare him any trouble, Reed told him that they must stop corresponding. In Washington he met Marlen Pew, who had once been busi­ ness manager of the Masses, and was now directing publicity for the war department. Reed looked out of the window of Pew’s office at marching soldiers and talked about the silly sheep in uniform. Pew assured him that life was what it was, and that it was absurd to ruin a career trying to change it. Even Steffens had no hope. Reed wrote him about the news­ paper blacklist against him, about the holding of his papers, about his arrest in Philadelphia. His mother was lamenting his smirching of the family name, and his brother was sailing for France. Intervention in Russia seemed certain. It was an un­ happy letter, as Reed apologetically recognized, but Steffens had only cold comfort for him. “You do wrong,” he wrote, “to buck this thing. In the first place, the war was inevitable; in the second place, the consequences of the war, its by-products, are normal and typical; in the third place, the public mind is sick. This last is what I learned in my experiences with it. I gave pain. I tried to speak, always, with consciousness that an audience was in trouble, psychologically, and I was just as tender as I could be. But sometimes I saw that what I said cut like a surgeon’s knife into a sore place, and I was sorry. I must wait. You must

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wait. I know it’s hard, but you can’t carry conviction. You can’t plant ideas. Only feelings exist. I think it is undemocratic to try to do much now. Write, but don’t publish.” Such counsel bewildered Reed but could not stop him. On Independence Day he and„Art Young were in Terre Haute to interview Eugene Debs. Debs had been arrested. A month be­ fore, a rumor had been circulated that he was leaving the Social­ ist Party. His answer was an eloquent, forthright statement in the Call, followed by a tour of the Middle West. Everywhere on the tour he had been threatened by police and vigilantes, and finally he had been arrested in Cleveland. Going through the rich trim Indiana country, Reed had the feeling that this was the real America, and Debs seemed the per­ fect Middle-Westerner, shrewd, tender-hearted, eloquent, and indomitable. He was in bed when they got there, but he in­ sisted on coming downstairs. He was gaunt and tall and seemed tired, but the warmth of his smile and the radiance of his whole person swept over them. He talked with charm such as Reed had never known, his face glowing, the words tumbling swiftly out of his mouth. He told about his trip, describing how he had outwitted the detectives watching him in Cleveland. People celebrating the holiday went by and stared, with malice and fear, at the house. “Let’s go out on the porch and give them a good show,” Debs proposed; so they sat on the porch, with their coats off, and laughed at the uneasiness of the passers-by. It did Reed good to be there with Art Young and Gene Debs, these two men who miraculously combined courage with calm­ ness and defiance with humor. What impressed Debs was that, in the face of such tremendous pressure from the patriots, oppo­ sition to war refused to die. “If this can’t break them down,” he said, “why then I know nothing can. Socialism’s on the way. They can’t stop it, no matter what they do.” And as they went down the steps, he wrung their hands and clapped their shoul­ ders, saying—and loud enough so that the neighbors could hear —“Now you tell all the boys everywhere who are making the fight, Gene Debs says he’s with you, all the way, straight through, without a flicker!” Two days later Reed spoke in Cleveland, where Debs had

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been arrested. The city had been thoroughly terrorized by the American Protective League, made up of the younger, brighter capitalists. Spies were everywhere, and dictaphones were placed in the homes of suspected persons. Reed arrived in the city earlier than he had been expected, disconcerting police, Depart­ ment of Justice operatives, and members of the Protective League. He gave his suitcase to a friend, who was pursued all over town and finally seized. The suitcase was broken open, though the detectives had no warrants, and Reed’s papers re­ moved. When he complained to Department of Justice officials, they restored his property and assured him it was all a mistake. The armory was crowded and the meeting enthusiastic. After it was over, federal officers examined all the men, holding those who did not have their military registration cards with them. Meanwhile, a group of twenty detectives and Protective League business men surrounded Reed on the platform. They yapped and snarled, but the agent of the Department of Justice said that Reed could leave town, since he could be arrested later if the stenographic record showed that he had committed treason. The leaguers, deeply disappointed, saw him leave for his hotel, es­ corted by two policemen. “We got this place sewed up,” one of the officers said. “We know everything that’s going on about everybody in the place. You can’t eat your dinner in a restau­ rant, you can’t go to a theatre, you can’t lay down to sleep, without we hear every word you utter.” Reed and Young went on to Chicago. Reed spoke at a big meeting in one of the theatres, and his classmate, Stuart Chase, who was working for the Federal Trade Commission, had him speak for the Fabian Club he had organized. But his chief pur­ pose in Chicago was to report the I.W.W. trial. In the federal court-room, beneath pictures of the barons at Runnymede and Moses on Sinai, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis presided. “A wasted man with untidy white hair, an emaciated face in which two burning eyes are set like jewels, parchment skin split by a crack for a mouth; the face of Andrew Jackson three years dead.” So Reed described him. “A fighter,” he said, “and a sport, according to his lights, and as just as he knows how to be.” And the prisoners: “One hundred and one men—lumber-jacks, har­

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vest-hands, miners, editors; one hundred and one who believe that the wealth of the world belongs to him who creates it, and that the workers of the world shall take their own.” In the early morning the prisoners came over from Cook County Jail, where moSt of them had been rotting for threequarters of a year, for bail had been set so high that only a few could be released. Reed knew some and came to know others —Haywood, Ralph Chaplin, Harrison George, George Andreytchine, Charley Ashleigh. They crowded together inside the rail of the court-room, some reading papers, one or two asleep, some sitting, some standing up. Reed felt that there could not be gathered together in America one hundred and one men more fit to stand for the social revolution. Somehow the scene seemed familiar to him, and suddenly the explanation came: it was like a meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Soviets in Petrograd. For a moment it seemed to him as if he were watching the Central Committee of American Soviets trying Kenesaw Mountain Landis for counter-revolution. Reed knew their stories, stories of a long war, a war against an enemy that had limitless power, gave no quarter, and obeyed none of the rules of civilized warfare—“the class struggle, the age-old guerrilla fight of the workers against the masters, world­ wide, endless, but destined to end!” Lawrence, Paterson, Mesaba Range, Everett—these were the battle-fields on which the one hundred and one had learned to fight. All Reed’s old admiration for the I.W.W. came back. He thought of their singing and of Joe Hill, their beloved maker of songs. For seven months these men had been in jail, bçfore the trial had begun. From the first day, the one issue had been the class struggle. Through the two months before Reed and Young came to Chicago, and for two months thereafter, strike-leaders, gunmen, rank-and-file workers, agitators, deputies, police, stool-pigeons, and secret service opera­ tives filed through the court-room, building the story of the bloody war of the classes. Reed heard Frank Rogers tell of the Speculator mine fire and of the murder of Frank Little. He heard A. S. Embree describe the Arizona deportations. And he listened to an agricultural worker named Eggel: “Well, they grabbed us. And the deputy says, ‘Are you a member of the

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I.W.W.?’ I says, ‘Yes’; so he asked for my card, and I gave it to him, and he tore it up. He tore the other cards up that the fellow-members along with me had, so this fellow-member says, ‘There is no use tearing the card up, we can get duplicates.’ ‘Well,’ the deputy says, ‘we can tear up the duplicates too.’ And this fellow-worker says, he says, ‘Yes, but you can’t tear it out of my heart.’ ”

Reed’s articles on Debs and the I.W.W. trial appeared in the September Liberator, and on a back page of the issue was a letter: Dear Max: I’m going to have to resign as one of the contributing editors of the Liberator. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I make this decision not without emotion, remembering our long work together on the Masses. But I feel that I must take my name off the editorial page. The reason is, I cannot in these times bring myself to share editorial responsibility for a magazine which exists upon the sufferance of Mr. Burleson. Of course, this does not mean that I want to stop contributing to the Liberator. And in the happy day when we can call a spade a spade without tying bunting on it, you will find me, as you have in the past, Yours for the Profound Social Change, John Reed.

And with it was Eastman’s reply:

Dear Jack: I haven’t a word of protest—only a deep feeling of regret. In your absence we all weighed the matter and decided it was our duty to the social revolution to keep this instrument we have created alive toward a time of great usefulness. You will help us with your writing and reporting, and that is all we ask. Personally I envy you the power to cast loose when not only a good deal of the dramatic beauty, but also the glamor of abstract moral principle, is gone out of the venture, and it remains for us merely the most effective and therefore the right thing to do. Yours as ever, Max Eastman.

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It was not a hasty decision on Reed’s part; it was not, as East­ man implied, a grandiloquent gesture; it was not the result of a personal quarrel, though both Max Eastman and his sister Crys­ tal, who was managing editor, felt that it was. Reed meant what he said and no more. Perhaps the talk with Debs and the sight of the I.W.W. prisoners had strengthened him. However that may be, he had determined not to follow the path of compro­ mise. That some compromises were necessary he did not doubt; he had no craving for martyrdom. But he could not commit him­ self, as the Liberator was and had to be committed, to a deliberate policy of concessions and evasions. What Reed was looking forward to and what he knew he must keep himself free for was the actual organization of the revolutionary forces of America. From the first he had had this in mind, and had discussed plans with the Bolshevik leaders. Exactly what form the organization should take he did not know; he was not, after all, a labor leader or a revolutionary tactician; his relation to the movement had been merely that of a close sympathizer. But he had not addressed some forty or fifty meetings without discovering that there was a powerful sentiment for revolution. If there were timid reformers in the Socialist Party, there were also revolutionaries, and he wanted to be ready to help them. The time had not quite come for militant action, and while he waited, he continued to devote himself to the interpretation of Russia. Article followed article in the Liberator, and speech fol­ lowed speech. In an article in the Call, he answered Herman Bernstein, who had begun attacking Russia in the New York Herald. On August 29, he spoke in Moline, Illinois, and on Labor Day in Chicago. His trial in Philadelphia was postponed, and his efforts to secure his papers from the government bore no fruit. He and Louise Bryant took a small apartment on Patchin Place, that they might have some foothold in the city, and often enough Reed came home to report that he was being followed by a detective. To many of his acquaintances Reed seemed bitter and head­ strong. So many friends were embarrassed when he spoke to them at the Harvard Club or avoided him on the street or took

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pains never to visit him that he became suspicious of almost every one. Always forthright and stubborn in the defense of his opinions, he became harsh and intolerant, for he saw every­ where the wreckage that what passed as tolerance had made of integrity. And people who were glad of an excuse for dissociat­ ing themselves from John Reed complained about his arrogance. The playboy, they said, had become conceited and humorless and dogmatic; they meant that he was dangerous. But there were satisfactions in the kind of life Reed was living. There was the almost pathetic gratitude of the great throngs of European-born workers to whom he spoke, and there was his sense of solidarity with the handful of serious revolu­ tionaries. Bill Haywood, after the conviction of the I.W.W. in Chicago, wrote him from Cook County Jail, speaking as one comrade to another: “The big game is over; we never won a hand. The other fellow had the cut, shuffle, and deal all the time. But we will do better when we get organized and can tie them on the industrial ground.” Debs wrote: “I have read and been deeply moved by your fine article in the September Libera­ tor. You write differently than any one else and your style is most appealing to me. There is a living something that breathes and throbs in all you say.” Charles Erskine Scott Wood, out in Portland, praised the Debs and I.W.W. articles and approved the resignation from the staff of the Liberator. Almost every day such letters came, not so often as the letters, anonymous and signed, of abuse, but often enough to make Reed know that he was not alone. On September 13, he spoke at Hunt’s Point Palace, where, fif­ teen months before, he had witnessed the arrest of Emma Gold­ man and Alexander Berkman. Four thousand persons crowded into the hall, and three thousand were turned away. His theme was intervention. He charged that the British had inspired the recent attempt to assassinate Lenin, that the Czecho-Slovaks had broken faith with the Soviets, and that Wilson could have prevented the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. The next morning he was arrested and charged with making seditious utterances. Federal Attorney Barnes asked that bail be fixed at $ 10,000, but $5000 was finally set. What irritated Reed more than anything else

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were the reports in most of the papers that he had promised not to make any more speeches and the assertion in one of them that he had broken down in Commissioner Hitchcock’s office and cried. “As a rule,” he stated in the Call the next day, “I do not take the trouble to deny the lies of the capitalist press, but in this case I believe the stories are part of a deliberate scheme to discredit Socialist speakers in the eyes of the rank and file. In order not to burden my friends with heavier obligations on my behalf, I promised that in case no bail was fixed I would not make any public speeches until my hearing, which is fixed for tomorrow morning. Since bail of f 5000 was fixed, I, of course, have made no promise not to speak. If people are to be im­ prisoned for protesting against intervention in Russia or for defending the workers’ republic in Russia, I shall be proud and happy to go to jail.” The hearing finally took place on September 23, and Reed was indicted for “wilfully, knowingly, and feloniously uttering scurrilous and abusive language” about the Siberian expedition of American troops. According to the records of the Federal agents, he had said, “This intervention that I am talking to you about is not allowed to be spoken about here in any other way than the government wants it to be spoken about. But in every other country in the world, in France and in Italy, the inter­ vention is characterized very boldly as a direct adventure of brigands.”

Reed was now under three indictments, the total bail amount­ ing to $12,000. The jîreliminaries of the second Masses trial started on the day he was indicted for his Hunt’s Point Palace speech, and the trial itself began a week later. Reed had seen enough of the temper of the American people to know that the editors were in many ways fortunate: they all came from old American stock; the judge was rather more lenient than most; it had never been possible to whip up in New York City the hysteria that dominated most smaller communities; and patriotic emotion, despite all the artificial stimulants, was beginning to slacken. Nevertheless, it was a fairly grim sort of humor that

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inspired him to say to Young, as they entered the court-room, “Well, Art, got your grip packed for Atlanta?” The drive was on for the fourth liberty loan, and as in the first trial there was a band in the City Hall Park that played the national anthem. Hillquit and Malone, the attorneys for the de­ fense in April, were unable to serve, and Seymour Stedman came on from Chicago to take their place, assisted by Charles Recht and Walter Nelles. In the selection of the jury, class issues were sharply raised. Earl Barnes, the prosecuting attorney, insisted on questioning each talesman about his attitude towards Social­ ism, and, naturally enough, Stedman objected to most of the men Barnes approved. Reed was at first, in spite of himself, a little shaken; the court seemed a relentless machine that would grind and grind and grind. But the selection of the jury became a kind of game, rather boring in the end, and he amused himself by making notes on the talesmen. There was one man who an­ nounced that he didn’t know what Socialism was but opposed it. There was a cotton manufacturer, grown wealthy in the war, who loudly protested his impartiality. There was a German who was determined to prove his patriotism. And there was one juror about whom Reed wrote simply, “Son of a bitch.” At first the emphasis was chiefly on the question of con­ spiracy, as it had been at the first trial, but gradually the issue sharpened, as the defendants took the stand and explained their position on the war. Reed was called to the stand on Octo­ ber 3, and Stedman began his examination. Gradually he led Reed to the point at which he could talk about his war expe­ riences. “I began to be a war correspondent in 1913,” he said, and up to the time I wrote that headline (“Knit a Strait-Jacket for Your Soldier Boy”) I had been in action some fifty-five times.” He spoke of Mexico—the siege of Torreon, the corpses piled high in the streets of Gomez, the death of his friends of La Tropa. He grew pale and tense. He told of what he had seen at the Marne, in Serbia, in Galicia. He described the German trench in which he spent a night: “We were in this trench, up to our waists in running water; in the back of the trenches, where it was slightly drier, were dugouts, where the men lived four or

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five days before they were taken back for rest. And the walls of these dugouts were of soft mud; they moved slowly down as the men lay down; and the only sounds were the snores of the exhausted people sleeping, and then next were the screams of rats. As we could look, at the people as they lay there in the light of a candle, you could see over their faces where insects were crawling, vermin crawling. From this German trench, I remember, lights were going up at one time; they were flashing the lights, lighting up the other trenches; and we looked through the port-hole, to the enemy trench, the French trench, eighty yards away. It had been raining for two weeks, two solid weeks of rain had come down, and in this mud midway between the two trenches—” “Keep your voice up, please,” Stedman warned. “Between these two trenches, in the mud, forty yards from each trench, there lay a heap of bodies, all that was left of the last French charge, and these bodies were slowly sinking in the mud, had been left out there wounded to die. Nobody dared to come out, although they were only forty yards from the French trenches, and forty yards from the Germans. There had been no cessation of fighting; the wounded had lain out there screaming and dying in the mud, and they were sinking in the mud, and in some cases there wasn’t anything left of those bodies but an arm or a leg sticking up out of the soft mud with the flesh rotten on it.” “Now, I came back here,” he went on, after telling of other things he had seen, “I came back here, and what did I find? What happened while I had gone to war? At the time I came back, which was at the*beginning of 1916, the society columns were full about people getting up war benefits, giving war plays, and the hotels and the houses of the upper West Side, upper Fifth Avenue, were full of knitting parties, knitting socks for soldiers. They were not knitting socks for soldiers because their sons were in the trenches, as they knit socks for soldiers now; they were knitting them for soldiers because it was the thing to do. They had Caruso sing there in the afternoon while they were knitting socks for soldiers, and the talk was all of frivolity about the fact there was a war going on in Europe; England

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and France were in it, it was fashionable to be in it, and we were not in it—why weren’t we in it? It made me sort of sick.” “And that is why you wrote that?” “That is why I wrote this thing. There was nothing—” “Didn’t you think,” the judge interrupted, “it was time we got into it if you saw all that?” Reed was dumbfounded. For nearly an hour he had told story after story of the horror of war, selecting deliberately the most gruesome incidents he had witnessed in Mexico and in Europe. “No,” he stumbled, “I—I did not think—I do not see the analogy. I think it was a reason to keep out.” Judge Manton instructed Stedman to continue, and the next question concerned Reed’s conception of war. “I was opposed to our going into the European war,” Reed said. “One of the reasons, I was a student of history, and I still am, and I do not think at that time anybody disputed that the reasons for the European war were based on the commercialized interests, of certain groups of European interests. I think in the last half of the nineteenth century—” Judge Manton broke in: “Now, we are not interested in that. We are interested in your state of mind.” “My state of mind is dependent on what I think about the war.” “You will not be permitted to argue it,” Manton ruled, and he proceeded to take up the questioning himself. “Were you opposed to the war after our going into it?” he asked. “Yes, sir.” “You have been opposed to it ever since?” “Yes, sir.” “Therefore, of course, you are opposed to obtaining the neces­ sary military forces.” It was the crucial point, and Reed had been carefully in­ structed by the defense attorneys. He parried and quibbled, but at last he said, “No, I was not opposed.” Stedman resumed, questioning Reed on his activities in Rus­ sia. Once more the judge interfered. “Are you a Socialist?” “I am now, sir.” “How long since?”

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“Well, I have been working with the Socialist movement for a long time. I did not become a Socialist until last summer.” Stedman turned the witness over to Prosecuting-Attorney Barnes for cross-examination. Barnes first asked about interven­ tion in Siberia, which Reed said he opposed. Then Barnes brought up the old story about Reed’s shooting from a German trench. Reed, again under instructions, said that he had fired into the air. “Do you agree,” Barnes asked, “with the views announced in the Masses with regard to the desirability of a proletarian revolution against the capitalists and the bourgeoisie?” “Yes, sir; all Socialists do.” “All Socialists do?” “Yes.” “And that, in your mind, is the only war that is worth fight­ ing in?” “Well, to tell you the truth, it is the only war that interests me. The smiling avowal left Barnes with nothing more to say, and, after Stedman’s redirect examination, which was chiefly concerned with his activities in the Bureau of International Propaganda, Reed was allowed to leave the stand. In some re­ spects it had not been a brilliant performance; in others it had. In the testimony regarding his experience as a war-correspond­ ent, he had introduced into the trial an argument that had no legal weight but did impress the jury. He had stated without equivocation his opposition to the war and his belief in Socialism and the class struggle. The one point on which he compromised was the question of intentional obstruction of the recruiting of military forces. * On the whole, the defendants were firmer than they had been in the spring. In the spring, as Reed wrote, Germany had been invading Russia; now the United States was the invader. The bitter persecution of all pacifists and radicals had sharpened the issue. “I think we all felt tranquil,” he wrote, “and ready to go to prison if need be. At any rate, we were not going to dissemble what we believed.” Even Eastman, in his eloquent summation of the defense, was far more outspoken than he had been in the spring, and made fewer concessions to the hysteria of the mo-

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ment. Complete frankness would unquestionably have brought conviction, with a probable sentence of twenty years in prison. Reed had no love for compromise, and he did not compromise one whit more than was necessary, but he was more useful out of prison than in. Both Eastman and Stedman carefully announced to the jurors what District Attorney Barnes would say, and in his closing address he, rather lamely, fulfilled their prophecies. After he had strained to achieve the maximum of patriotic eloquence, he spoke of a friend of his who had died in France. “Somewhere in France,” Barnes cried, “he lies dead, and he died for you and me. He died for Max Eastman, he died for John Reed, he died for Merrill Rogers. His voice is but one of a thousand silent voices that demand that these men be punished.” Art Young, who had been quietly sleeping, woke and looked about him. He listened for a moment, and then leaned across the table. “Who’s he talking about?” he asked. “Didn’t he die for me too?” The jury disagreed, eight for acquittal, four against. The sec­ ond Masses trial was over, and the indictment was soon to be dismissed, one less for John Reed to face. He knew that it might have been very different if he had not been bom in Portland, Oregon, and educated at Harvard. It was by no means an un­ qualified triumph for free speech; to no small extent it was a victory for the air of respectability. The next week, in the same court-room, he saw six Russian boys and girls given sentences of from fifteen to twenty years for distributing leaflets against intervention in Russia. If the Masses trial had inspired any illu­ sions about fairness and freedom of speech, this was enough to dispel them. The enemy had no intention of surrendering.

XVIII Spokesman of the Soviets

the moment he landed at the Atlantic port until he sailed from it again, eighteen months later, John Reed did more than any other one person to make known the truth about the Russian revolution. Not only did his book prove to be much the best written by an American eye-witness, both the most vivid and the most intelligent; before and after the book appeared, his speeches and his articles answered the questions that Americans were asking. During 1918 he published in the Liberator articles on Kerensky, the Russian army, the Depart­ ment for Foreign Affairs, intervention, propaganda in the Ger­ man army, and the structure and operation of the Soviet govern­ ment. These articles were reprinted in radical papers all over the United States and Canada, and workers found in them the truth that the capitalist press was determined to conceal. His appointment as an official representative of the Soviets had been canceled, but he was nonetheless the spokesman of the Bolshe­ viks in the United States.* In the fall of 1918 there was a new attack on the Bolsheviks, led by the Hearst-trained Mr. Sisson. With the imprimatur of George Creel and the approval of a committee of professors made somewhat less than sane by the war, Mr. Sisson issued his famous collection of forgeries, purporting to show that the Bol­ shevik leaders were in the pay and under the orders of Berlin. There were letters from the German general staff, correspond­ ence between Bolshevik leaders, orders on banks, reports of telephone conversations, all revealing with not quite credible thoroughness and naivete, the direct connection between the 321 rom

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Germans and the Bolsheviks. Mr. Creel said that the documents were, on the face of them, genuine, and the historians solemnly agreed. Although it had been known in Petrograd that Sisson was in the market for “documents” of this sort, Reed had scarcely be­ lieved he would dare to publish them. Since the article in which he exposed the forgeries was not ready in time for the November issue of the Liberator, the editors published it as a pamphlet. Many of the documents, he pointed out, had been discredited when they were used by the Kerensky government at the time of the July uprising. They had been hawked about by an un­ scrupulous editor named Semenov, and had been rejected by the French and British governments as insufficiently plausible. Robins of the Red Cross had told Sisson they were forgeries, and doubts of their authenticity were expressed by others, including Graham R. Taylor and Arthur Bullard, who in a cable to Creel minimized their importance, “even if genuine.” Apart from the history of their shady origin, there was, as Reed pointed out, plenty of internal evidence to discredit them. The first two documents, supposedly orders for the destruction of evidence of the German-Bolshevik plot, carefully told what the evidence was. Several letters referred to events that had not taken place at the time the letters were supposedly written. The authors often showed an amazing ignorance of details with which they should have been familiar, speaking of Volodarsky, for example, as a commissar, referring to Joffe as chairman of the Military Revolutionary Committee, placing Tarasov-Radionov in Tomsk at a time when he was living in Reed’s hotel in Petro­ grad. Sisson’s notes, moreover, were full of errors, and although, as Reed recognized, this did not discredit the documents, it threw doubt on Sisson’s ability to judge their authenticity. That some of the documents might be genuine, Reed granted, but these were given a false significance by their juxtaposition with forgeries. The collection as a whole was a preposterous fabrica­ tion. Reed had no time to make a detailed analysis, but he spoke out, as almost no one else did, and he spoke convincingly. He was always ready to speak out. When an article by M. L. Lar-

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kin appeared in the Public , attacking the Bolsheviks, Reed wrote to point out Larkin’s errors. When Upton Sinclair wanted to have Gorky’s attitude towards the Soviets explained, Reed wrote a letter, published in Sinclair’s magazine, explaining the limita­ tions of the intelligentsia. The magazine, called Upton Sin­ clair’s, later published another exchange of letters between them. “The war to you seems simple,” Reed wrote Sinclair, “the Rus­ sian revolution complicated. I must confess that it seems the other way round to me; not that the Russian revolution is en­ tirely simple, however. I cannot see how any Socialist can doubt either the integrity of the great majority of the Soviet leaders, or the splendor of the Bolshevik dream, or even the possibility of its practical working-out. All intellectuals will criticize and be disappointed with the social revolution when it starts; and if it seems hasty, unprepared for, or based on irrealizable dreams, they will perhaps oppose it. But if the overwhelming masses of the people are going quite consciously somewhere, neither you nor I will stand off and refuse to participate. I know it is the facts I tell you that you do not believe; and I must be content to wait for history. But I know that I am right. I have not dreamed, but have studied and investigated as I never did be­ fore.” Lecturing went on night after night. And on November 7, the anniversary of the Bolshevik triumph, there was a series of meetings, in Hunt’s Point Palace, the New Star Casino, Brooklyn Labor Lyceum, Brownsville Labor Lyceum. Reed, though he was coming down with influenza, made the rounds with the other speakers, Albert Rhys Williams, Scott Nearing, Eastman, and Nuorteva. Always there were cheers when he described the events of November 7, 1917, the flight of Kerensky, the All-Russian Congress, the capture of the Win­ ter Palace. At the meetings a booklet was distributed, One Year of Revolution, and of course there was an article of Reed’s included. These were exciting days. Close on the anniversary of the Russian revolution came the false armistice, the uprising in Ger­ many, the abdication of the Kaiser, and then the real cessation of hostilities. Reed was in bed with influenza, but he felt the

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elation of the moment. It seemed certain that the era of world revolution had begun. Immediately militant Socialists throughout the United States began to organize their forces. In Chicago the Communist Propaganda League was founded. Thç Boston Socialist local began to issue the Revolutionary Age, with Louis Fraina and Eadmonn MacAlpine as editors and Scott Nearing, John Reed, N. I. Hourwich, Ludwig Lore, Sen Katayama, and G. Wein­ stein as contributing editors. It was at first a four-page tabloid issued three times a week, and later an eight-page semi-weekly. The paper described events in Russia and Germany, printed statements by Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, fought for Mooney and the other class-war prisoners in the United States, and agitated for a militant policy for the Socialist Party. Reed wrote for almost every issue. John Reed had no doubt that revolution was imminent. He told Roger Baldwin, who was being sent to jail as a conscientious objector, that he would be freed by the workers long before his sentence had ended. And yet he had no illusions about the actual state of mind of the American working class, which he called, “the most uneducated working class in the world.” He felt that the Socialist Party was partly made up of petty bourgeois, and that nothing was farther from their normal desires than a revolution. “The Socialists have some power,” he wrote. “They can swing a million votes. The official majority in the Socialist Party is more interested in ‘swinging’ those votes than in Social­ ism.” But he was counting on history: “Nothing teaches the American working class except hard times and repression. Hard times are coming, repression is organized on a grand scale. In America for a long time there has been no free land, no oppor­ tunity for workers to become millionaires. The working class does not yet know this. But if Tom Mooney stays in jail, if wages go down, if Socialists are arrested and the red flag sup­ pressed, there will be a revolutionary movement in this country in five years.”

All through November and December Reed was active in the left wing, speaking at its meetings and writing for the Révolu-

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tionary Age. But time for such activities was hard to find. The government had at last returned his Russian material and he was writing Ten Days That Shook the World. With an advance from Boni and Liveright to meet immediate needs, he settled down to day after day of «olid writing. Finding that he was too often interrupted, both in the Croton house and in his little apartment on Patchin Place, he took a room in Paula Holladay’s Greenwich Inn, way up in the attic, and told no one where he was. Rapidly the book took shape. It was to be simply the story of the Bolshevik triumph. A second book, he planned, would de­ scribe Russia’s foreign relations, the origins and functions of revolutionary organizations, the evolution of popular sentiment, and the structure of the Soviet State; it would be called From Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk. And there would be a third, The Smoke of Insurrection, to contain the impressionistic sketches he had written or planned to write. But this first book would take the reader day by day through the revolution. It was Arthur Garfield Hays who suggested the title. The book was not a compilation of what he had written on the revolution. Even the beginning he had made in Christiania was discarded. He used his articles, of course, as notes, and often took over phrases and occasionally paragraphs that he liked. But the book grew, page by page, in three months of tense writing, into an organic expression of all that he had seen in Russia and all that he had learned since his return. For the backbone of the book he used his notebooks, the record of his own experi­ ences. But this was not a story of personal adventure. It was documented as nothing Reed had written had been documented. He had complete files of the Russian Daily Neves, the Journal de Russie, Entente, and the Bulletin de la Presse. He had hundreds of Russian newspapers of all parties. He had his extraordinary collection of proclamations and decrees, which he had had trans­ lated. He was poet, journalist, and scholar. It is no wonder that Ten Days That Shook the World is a great book. John Reed knew how to use his eyes: Insurgent Mexico had shown that. He knew all the tricks that a good news­ paperman knows, and could think in terms of headlines as well

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as in terms of color and romance. And he had learned, slowly and resistingly, the value of accuracy and documentation, learned it at Ludlow and Bayonne and in the fight against war. He was perfectly trained for the task of reporting a revolution. But there was something more than that; he was a participant as well as an observer, and his book was a weapon as well as a report, all the more effective for its restraint and precision. In those three months that he spent bent over a typewriter, sur­ rounded by his great piles of papers and pamphlets, he knew what he was doing: the world must be shaken again and again. By the middle of January the book was on the press, and Reed was once more speaking four or five nights a week. The board of education in New York City had forbidden the use of a pub­ lic school for a meeting against intervention in Russia, and Reed and Eastman spoke in protest. There was a meeting of Finns, hundreds of whom came and maintained a stolid silence in the face of Reed’s hot enthusiasm. There was a meeting in Erie, Pennsylvania, at which a group calling themselves the Erie So­ viet of Workers presented Reed with a written testimonial in appreciation of “the valuable and faithful services you have un­ flinchingly rendered the Russian Socialist Republic since your arrival in this country from Russia.” In Boston, under the aus­ pices of the Committee for a Democratic Peace, Reed spoke to three thousand people, saying, “No one who thinks it was wrong to go into Belgium can think it is right to go into Russia,” and, “The Red Terror isn’t confined to Russia; we have a little terror over here.” In Brooklyn a hundred policemen were assigned to one of his meetings. Having been told that he must not criticize the gov­ ernment, he began, “My family came to this country, both branches, in 1607; one of my ancestors was Patrick Henry, who signed the Declaration of Independence; another of my ances­ tors was a general under George Washington; and another was a colonel on the northern side in the Civil War. I have a brother, a major in the aviation corps, now in France. I am a voter and a citizen of the United States, and I claim the right to criticize it as much as I please. I criticize the form of it because I claim that it is not a democratic enough government for me. I consider the

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Soviet government a more democratic government at the pres­ ent time than our own government.” He spoke of America’s professed war aims. “Well, the war is finished, comrades, and where in hell is the democracy? Now in New York City free speech is suppressed; Socialists are not allowed to meet; the red flag is banned; periodicals are barred from the mails; all the evi­ dences of Prussianism appear.” The government had pretended that it was a war between two ideas, democracy and autocracy, but it had been merely a war between two sets of capitalists. “Now the war is ended,” he said, “but a new war is beginning; and this time it is a war between two ideas.” In the Revolutionary Age Reed wrote on capitalist terror in Europe and America. “The workers of Bridgeport,” he wrote, “the workers of Bethlehem, are now witnessing the discharge, not only of all active union men, but also of members of workers’ committees instituted by the United States Govern­ ment’s War Labor Board . . . Out in Arizona the detectives and hangers-on of the copper mine owners who deported striking miners, who deliberately broke the law and spat on the Consti­ tution, have been acquitted.... Does any American worker now doubt the innocence of Tom Mooney, or the filthy crookedness of the California court and district attorney which convicted him? . . . And Eugene Debs, sentenced to ten years, and Rose Pastor Stokes, and all the brave men and women who dared to tell the truth when it was dangerous, and now suffer in prison; is it difficult to guess why they were punished? ... There is but one alternative to this: industrial unions, the Socialist Party, the general strike, and a labor democracy, in which those who do all the work shall have all the power.” The whole question of tactics was beginning to trouble him. Most Socialists, he wrote, seemed to try to give the impression that “Socialism is really Jeffersonian democracy, to intimate that all we want are reasonable reforms, labor legislation, and the full dinner pail.” Their theory appeared to be, “First make a liberal, and then convert him to Socialism.” “Fully a third of the Social­ ist votes are, in normal times, cast by middle-class persons who think that Karl Marx wrote a good anti-trust law.” “I have no quarrel,” he said, “with that kind of propaganda—except that it

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does not make Socialists.” The comrades of the left wing “must find out from the American workers what they want most, and they must explain this in terms of the whole labor movement, and they must make the workers want more—make them want the whole revolution.” Reed did not cease writing for the Liberator, The March issue contained a warm tribute to Karl Liebknecht, murdered with Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin. Recalling his visit to Liebknecht in the winter of 1914-15, Reed wrote of his courage and faith. “When at last the revolution came, with the Kaiser Socialists half-timorously holding the wheel, the first thing done by the workers was to set Karl Liebknecht free from prison. He must have known, as he was drawn in his flower-filled carriage through the shouting streets, that his hour was near. He must have known—when he cried to the throng from the balcony of the Russian embassy, the red flag floating over him, ‘The future belongs to the people!’—that for him there would be no future. ... He was killed by the international capitalist class, it is true. What else could be expected? But remember! Those whose hands are red with Liebknecht’s blood and the blood of the Ger­ man workers are the German Majority Social Democrats—the Kaiser Socialists—Ebert, Scheidemann, and the rest—who put down the workers’ insurrection with the help of the Kaiser sol­ diers, and paid for it with the lives of Liebknecht and Rosa Lux­ emburg.” In the same issue was Reed’s last play, a fantasy called “The Peace That Passeth Understanding.” The curtain rises upon Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando, and Makino. Or­ lando rebukes Wilson for having said in Turin, “The industrial workers will dictate the peace terms.” “You must remember,” Orlando says, “that Italian workers are not educated—we have no Samuel Gompers.” When Wilson explains that such expres­ sions are only to be interpreted in their Wilsonian sense, Cle­ menceau congratulates him on his finesse, especially in inventing that fine phrase, “League of Nations,” to describe the old idea of the balance of power. This reminds Makino of an earlier American phrase, “the open door in China,” and he adds his praises. Wilson says modestly, “A trifling achievement. Why in

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America, my second campaign was won by the phrase, ‘He kept us out of war.’ ” After the Serbian, Belgian, Czecho-Slovakian, Roumanian, Ar­ menian, Yugo-Slav, Polish, and Central and South American del­ egates have been disposed of, and the peace conference made safe from democracy, Wilson explains the fourteen points, one by one, to the satisfaction and delight of his companions. While Makino and Lloyd George roll dice for the Pacific colonies, Wilson prepares a statement describing the moral victory that his “earnestness and eloquence, supported by the unselfish mo­ tives of the United States government in entering the war” have won. But just as he is giving it to the press, news comes of revo­ lution throughout the world, and the delegates, seeking a stable government under which to live, decide to go to Russia. The playlet, which was repeatedly produced by the Wash­ ington Square Players, suggested what had happened to John Reed’s sense of humor. Certainly he had not lost it, but it had sharpened into a sardonic sense of the vast hypocrisies and ab­ surdities of capitalist civilization. He was, as a matter of fact, rather more likely than he had once been to find amusement in the annoyances of his own life as well as in the blatancies of a Palmerized America. When the Fifth Avenue Bank used the ex­ cuse of an overdrawn account to refuse to accept more deposits, and when the Harvard Club suspended him for an unpaid bill, he was irritated, but only for a little while. These were the petty tactics of bankrupt men, and he knew that he could afford to laugh at them. Reed found time to write the little play, but he could not find time for poetry. He wished he could. One snowy night, when he was hurrying back, without coat or hat, to Patchin Place, he met Sherwood Anderson on the comer of Fifth Av­ enue and Ninth Street. For an hour they talked: did a poet do more by lying low and trying to get understanding, or whatever it was poets were after, or by giving himself to the fight? Reed didn’t know; he wouldn’t say the other way was wrong; but for himself, well, somebody had to do the fighting. And yet: “If I could be dead sure I had something on the ball as a poet. . .” he said. He knew of course that he had plenty on the ball. That

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was not the question. It was too bad, but poetry would have to wait.

There was another opportunity for Reed to strike a blow for Russia. On September 19, 1918, as a result of charges made by A. Mitchell Palmer, then custodian of alien property, a sub-com­ mittee of the Senate was appointed to investigate brewing and liquor interests and German propaganda, with Senator Lee S. Overman as chairman, and Senators King, Wolcott, Nelson, and Sterling as his associates. Sessions began on September 21, and for some weeks Mr. Palmer’s charges were investigated. After the end of the war, however, German espionage became an old story, and the committee turned its attention to Bolshevism. Mr. Jacob M. Kennedy, secretary of the Montana Commercial and Labor League, helped to accomplish the transition when, on January 17, 1919, he announced that there was a connection be­ tween pro-Germanism and Bolshevism in Montana. On January 21, Thomas J. Tunney, a New York City inspector of police, appeared and confirmed Kennedy’s insinuations about the rela­ tions between the two forms of anti-Americanism. Finally, when Archibald E. Stevenson was called, the committee had no diffi­ culty in recognizing its duty. Mr. Stevenson, who had been chairman of the committee on aliens of the Mayor’s Committee of National Defense of New York, and subsequently a special agent for the Department of Justice and a member of the military intelligence division, was prepared to demonstrate that pro-Germans, pacifists, and Bol­ sheviks were one and the same. With the assistance of Major E. Lowry Humes, who had been assigned to the committee by the War Department, he thoroughly covered the various liberal, pacifist, and working-class organizations of the country. At last he came to the Russian revolution. “The interesting feature of the Bolsheviki movement,” he said, “is that every one of these cur­ rents that we have spoken of is now cooperating with the Bol­ sheviki emissaries. We have several avowed agents of the Bolshe­ viki government here-avowed propagandists.” “In this country; operating here?” Senator Nelson cried in amazement.

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“In this country; operating today,” Stevenson insisted. Nelson asked for names. “Two of them are American citi­ zens,” he was told. “One is John Reed, a graduate of Harvard University.” “You don’t say?” Nelson ejaculated. In describing Reed’s appointment as consul, Stevenson men­ tioned his having brought official forms for marriage and divorce with him. “What are the forms and requirements for marriages and divorces under the Soviet government in Russia?” Major Humes asked. “Simply a statement before the proper commissary that they want to be married, or that they want to be divorced.” “Do they have as many wives as they want?” the chairman asked. “In rotation,” Stevenson answered. “Polygamy is recognized, is it?” Humes insisted. Stevenson hedged. “I do not know about polygamy. I have not gone into the study of their social order quite as fully as that.” Nelson, always a little slow but enormously persistent, would not let the question drop. “That is,” he said, “a man can marry and then get a divorce when he gets tired, and get another wife?” “Precisely.” “And keep up the operation?” “Yes.” “Do you know whether they teach free love?” Overman asked. “They do,” Stevenson assured him. Though there were still a few witnesses to be heard on the subject of German propaganda, the committee was eager to get on to Bolshevism. On February 2, Louise Bryant and Albert Rhys Williams spoke on Russia in a meeting held in Washing­ ton. The newspaper publicity roused the Senate, which, on the motion of Senator Walsh of Montana, voted to extend the power of the Overman committee so that it could make a sweeping in­ vestigation of Bolshevism. Hatred of the Huns was no longer necessary, but hatred of the Bolsheviki had practical value in a

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nation whose industrial leaders were entering on a campaign for the open shop and pre-war hours and wages. On February n, the first witness appeared, William Chapin Huntington, who had served as commercial attache of the De­ partment of Commerce to the American embassy in Petrograd, and who testified to the chaos in Russia and the unpopularity of the Bolsheviks. He was followed by Professor Samuel N. Har­ per, of the University of Chicago, who, though anti-Bolshevik, insisted on academic qualifications and reticences, and disap­ pointed the committee. The Reverend George A. Simons, how­ ever, who came to the hearing as “a one hundred percent Ameri­ can and a Christian clergyman,” quoted the Jewish Protocols as authoritative, said the Bolsheviks “rape and ravish and despoil women at will,” and attacked Reed and Williams by name. For a week the committee examined a procession of witnesses, each of them hostile to the Soviet regime: Y.M.C.A. workers, business men, and refugees. R. B. Dennis, a teacher at North­ western University, said, “I do not know Mr. Williams or Mr. Reed. I have read their stuff and John Williams’ wife’s book.” Robert F. Leonard, who, like Mr. Dennis, had been with the Y.M.C.A., was persuaded to talk about Bolshevik morality. Sena­ tor Nelson observed, “That man, Maxim Gorky I believe his name is, whom they have taken into the fold, is about as immoral as they make them.” A business man appearing anonymously during an executive session, described the demoralization of the workmen. Madame Breshkovskaya, who had come to the United States, attacked Lenin and Trotsky. Two employees of the Na­ tional City Bank in Petrograd testified to the evil state of affairs, and Roger E., Simmons of the Department of Commerce read to the committee the famous “decree” regarding the nationalization of women. By this time it was apparent that the committee had no desire to hear any one who was even mildly sympathetic to the Bol­ sheviks. Reed, Louise Bryant, Williams, and their friends wrote and telegraphed Senator Overman, and finally it was announced that they would be permitted to testify. Louise Bryant came first, on the afternoon of February 20. The Senators began: “Do you believe in God?” “Do you believe

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in the sanctity of an oath?” “Are you a Christian?” “Do you believe in Christ?” “Do you believe in a punishment hereafter and a reward for duty?” Finally she explained, “It seems to me as if I were being tried for witchcraft!” “This is important,” Senator King explained, “because a person who has no concep­ tion of God does not have any idea of the sanctity of an oath, and an oath would be meaningless.” When the oath had finally been taken, the questions chiefly concerned her activities in the woman suffrage campaign. “You said that you were at the National Women’s Party headquar­ ters?” Nelson asked. “Yes, sir.” “Did you belong to the picket squad?” “I do not know what that has to do with the truth about Russia, but I did. I believe in equality for women as well as men, even in my own country.” “Did you participate in the burning of the President’s mes­ sage?” “Yes.” “You did not participate in the burning of the effigy?” Over­ man asked. “I did; and I went on a hunger strike.” “What do you mean by that; you went to jail?” “I went to jail and went on a hunger strike. If you go without food and become weak, the authorities let you out because they do not want you to die in jail.” Senator King took up the examination, asking her about her marriage to Trullinger and her divorce. Miss Bryant suggested that she was supposed to be telling about Russia. “We want to know something about the character of the person who testi­ fies,” King explained, “so that we can determine what credit to give to the testimony.” King went on to ask if she had taken an oath, when she got her passport, not to engage in political activities, and, on her ad­ mission that she had, he tried to force her to say that she had violated it. Failing in that, he turned to the subject of Reed’s oath.

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Nelson took a hand. “Was your husband employed by the Bolsheviki?” “Yes, sir.” “Employed for what purpose?” “He worked in the propaganda department, and I will show you the kind of papers. There has never been any secret about this kind of propaganda. For instance—” Nelson interrupted: “We do not care about that.” “Do not care about it?” “About those papers. We want the facts.” “Those are the facts. You must admit the facts. Here is a paper printed in German, prepared for sending into the German lines in order to make—” Enraged, Nelson said, “Do not be so impertinent!” There were hisses and applause, and Senator Overman threatened to clear the room. Louise Bryant broke in: “You said, Senator Overman, that I am not on trial here. I am a free American citi­ zen. I expect to be treated with the same courtesy as former wit­ nesses, and I have not gotten it so far.” Immediately there was applause, and Overman ordered every one, except the stenog­ rapher and the reporters, from the room. Reed rose from his place in the audience, and asked if he might stay. Permission was granted him. The executive session was somewhat less belligerent, but its spirit was the same. The committee was obviously quite uninter­ ested in anything Louise Bryant might have to say about Russia, seeking only to extract from her incriminating facts about Reed, Williams, Raymond Robins, Jerome Davis, and any one else who was known not to be bitterly critical of the Soviets. Major Humes finally took up the questioning, and, after raising the subject of the nationalization of women and then refusing to allow her to explain the origin of the “decrees,” permitted her to tell a little of what she had seen. When the committee re-convened the next morning, Humes was armed with a valuable discovery he had made during the night. Louise Bryant had said that she had credentials from the Philadelphia Public Ledger, whereas actually her credentials were from the Bell Syndicate. The truth was that when the Ledger

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bought her articles, they had asked her to make it appear that she had represented them in Russia. She had kept up the fiction, and the Ledger now repudiated her. While Humes tried to make as much as possible of this, Louise Bryant suddenly shifted the attack. “I want to know,” she said, “why, after my testimony yesterday, you sent a telegram to Mr. Williams, whom you accused of spreading Bolshevik propaganda, and said ‘Disregard telegram of February 19. Subpoena with­ drawn.’ And if it is also true that you withdrew the subpoena to Colonel Robins because you were afraid that too much truth would come out here?” It was Humes’ turn to object: “I do not know that I am on the witness stand,” he said with dignity, “or that it is a matter with which the witness is concerned.” Having the advantage, Louise Bryant pressed on, protesting against her treatment the day before; she had been given an examination for heresy by Senator King, lectured on her morals by Senator Nelson, and heckled by every one. She went on to speak of the persons who had asked to testify and had not been called. Humes denied that Reed had asked to appear, and Reed spoke up from the audience, so that Overman had to suggest that the letter might have been mislaid. On the whole it was Louise Bryant’s morning, and, though the committee and Major Humes did their best to dis­ credit her testimony, she managed to tell her story of the revo­ lution. Reed was called at three-thirty that afternoon. Having seen the treatment his wife had been accorded, he was prepared. There he was, tall, strong, impressive, with a smile on his face and ruthlessness in his eyes. He swaggered a little, eying the senators with a kind of careless defiance. But he was deadly serious. If the committee proposed to browbeat him, they would find him too quick and too strong. If they wanted to play a game, he would beat them at it. There was the usual wrangle about the oath, and then, with ostentatious cheerfulness, Reed answered Humes’ questions about his newspaper career, the assurances he had made with re­ gard to the Stockholm Conference, and his behavior in Petro­ grad. His description of conditions before, during, and after the

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revolution was so clear that the senators could find no chance for objections. He discussed factory management, the status of the press, the use of violence, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the handling of food cards, the amount of crime, and the operation of the soviets. His work with the Bureau of Inter­ national Propaganda he defended, as usual, on the ground that it had been directed against the Kaiser. And the defense was by no means specious, even from the point of view of the American government, for General Hoffman, Germany’s military repre­ sentative at Brest-Litovsk, had said, “Immediately after conquer­ ing those Bolsheviks, we were conquered by them. Our victori­ ous army on the eastern front became rotten with Bolshevism.” Humes did his best to make Reed admit that he either did or did not advocate the overthrow of government by force. Reed insisted that he held merely to the opinion that, under certain circumstances, extra-constitutional methods of change might be necessary. Humes shifted his ground, bringing up the famous Dunn story of the shooting from the German trenches. “I do not know how many times this thing must be contradicted,” Reed said, “but I am perfectly willing to keep on contradicting it.” Senator Wolcott brought the investigation back to Reed’s views, and Humes asked, “Have you in any of your public speeches advocated a revolution in the United States similar to the revolution in Russia?” “I have always advocated a revolution in the United States.” Humes was startled. “You are in favor of a revolution in the United States?” “Revolution,” Reed explained, “does not necessarily mean a revolution by force. By revolution I mean a profound social change. I do not know how it will be attained.” “Do you not in your speeches leave the impression with your audiences that you are talking about a revolution of force?” “Possibly.” “Do you mean,” Wolcott asked, “to leave that impression?” “No. My point is that the will of the people will be done; the will of the great majority of the people will be done.” “That is a sound point,” Wolcott admitted.

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“That is my point, and if the will of the great majority is not done by law, it will be done some other way. That is all.” “Do you not know, Mr. Reed,” Wolcott went on, “that the use of the word ‘revolution’ in the ordinary meaning carries the idea of force, arms, and conflict?” “Well, as a matter of fact, unfortunately, all these profound social changes have been accompanied by force. There is not one that has not.” A moment later Wolcott said, “Your mental agility is, I con­ fess, too much for me.” It was true. When Humes raised a point about the land decrees, Wolcott again tried to argue with Reed. “Suppose you lived in one of those villages,” he said, “and you had a couple of sons—and they were twins . . .” Reed politely bowed, “Thank you, sir,” he said. The committee was glad to let him go. Before he left, he named a number of men he would like to have called: Frank Keddie, Raymond Robins, Major Allen Wardwell, who, he thought, “would be a peach,” Major Thacher, and Jerome Davis. A number of these people were summoned. Albert Rhys Wil­ liams fared reasonably well, perhaps because the committee had been a little chastened by their experience with Reed and Louise Bryant. Senator Nelson, however, could not resist the tempta­ tion to bully Bessie Beatty, and Overman had to apologize for him. Frank Keddie, a representative of the American Society of Friends, was heckled because of his pacifism. Colonel Robins met unconcealed hostility with dignity and courage. Ambassador Francis, in his testimony, satisfied the committee on every point and attacked Robins so unscrupulously that the committee had to hold a special session to permit Robins to reply. When Oliver Sayler began by saying, “I want to insist in ad­ vance, Senator, that I am no Bolshevik,” Nelson said, “You need not mind that. We will judge whether you are a Bolshevik by what you tell us.” That was the attitude of the committee: any­ body who did not vociferously damn the Soviets must be a Bol­ shevik and therefore was not to be believed. The testimony of Reed and the men he had recommended did not alter in the slightest the opinions of the committee, but at least he had the

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satisfaction of saying his say and of discomforting the men who had started out to heckle and confuse him. What irritated him was that the newspapers could so easily turn his victory into a defeat. After having forced the commit­ tee to listen to the facts about Russia, he saw those facts twisted in the press. The papers could not ignore his testimony and him; so they distorted and belittled. Stanley Frost in the Tribune called him “a man to whom clever phrases are an intoxication and patient study utterly impossible,” “a soldier of fortune,” “a matinee idol.” Like the other reporters, he seized on Reed’s face­ tious statement that he might be able to get money from wealthy women to establish a bureau of information about Soviet Russia. “Good sport,” he wrote. “Money from rich women, speeches urging force that he doesn’t believe in, the distinction of wide disapproval, stir and excitement and revolution. Good sport and little risk—for Reed!” Then there was a paper that carried an editorial entitled “One Man Who Needs the Rope.” “John Reed,” it said, “told the Senate committee investigating Bolshevism that he was a firm advocate of revolution in the United States. ... If there is no law for handling a case of this kind one should be enacted speed­ ily. If a man should be hanged for instigating another to murder one man, he should certainly be hanged for instigating men to kill thousands of men. If the law is defective, why wait until to­ morrow to remedy its defects? A law should be passed at once against such utterances as those brazenly made by this man Reed, and then as soon as possible ten thousand hangings should fol­ low.” But all this was nothing compared to the actual misrepresenta­ tion that kept his testimony from the public. “My one complaint against you and the other paid agents of the capitalist class,” he wrote the New York Times in a letter it refused to publish, “is not that you oppose Bolshevism, but deliberately pervert and suppress the truth about it and about what is going on in Russia. It is all very well to state that Bolshevism means wholesale mur­ der, socialization of women, robbery unrestrained, and then say that I stand for it. It is all very well to say that the Bolsheviki are anarchists (although anarchy in Russia and America is openly

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opposed to the strongly centralized proletarian state built up in Russia), and then call us, who defend Bolshevism, anarchists. This of course is a very convenient method of carrying on a sin­ ister propaganda for the benefit of those ruthless interests who plunged the world into a war which cost more than seven mil­ lion lives, and who are rich with blood-money. But it is not the truth—and you know it is not the truth.” He went on to comment on the way the committee had con­ ducted its sessions and to illustrate the Times* treatment of the evidence. He alluded to the charge that he was growing rich on Moscow gold. “There is no money,” he said, “in speaking to working-class audiences, or writing in working-class papers, which are the only audiences and papers open to any advocacy of the truth about Soviet Russia. All persons who work for an unselfish purpose for little or nothing are incomprehensible to persons who never work for nothing and can be hired to work for anything.” From Washington Reed went straight to Philadelphia, where his trial began on February 24. The charge of “incitement to sedi­ tious remarks” had been dropped, and both Kogerman and Reed were charged with riot and assault and battery. The more con­ servative Socialists of the city refused to have anything to do with the case, since Reed was a Bolshevik, and he had to secure his own lawyer. At first he tried to persuade Seymour Stedman to take the case, but Stedman believed a local lawyer would be more successful, and Charles Ervin, of the Call, recommended David Wallerstein. Most of Wallerstein’s work had been for corporations, but he likeà Reed, when Ervin introduced him, and the charge seemed to him absurd. He insisted on taking the case without pay. Henry J. Nelson defended Kogerman. The judge, Raymond MacNeille, knew nothing about Social­ ism and boasted of the fact. The Jurors and District Attorney Fox were equally ignorant. Fox made, of course, the most of his patriotic opportunities, and the newspapers clamored for a con­ viction. Reed believed that acquittal was impossible. Wallerstein, however, handled the case with great skill. He first succeeded in having the charge of assault and battery dismissed, and then

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had Reed testify. Reed told his story simply and well. In crossexamination Fox concentrated on Reed’s motives in going to the hall after he had been informed that the permit had been can­ celed, trying to maintain, of course, that he had gone there with the deliberate intention of provoking a, riot. When Wallerstein called a number of witnesses, Fox made much of the fact that most of them were foreigners, and the judge refused to sustain Wallerstein’s objections. Wallerstein, in summing up, placed all his emphasis on the right of freedom of speech. “I am not a So­ cialist,” he said, “but when the superintendent of police can say who shall or shall not speak, it is better that we stop talking about democracy.” He maintained both that Reed had every right to test the police ruling and that no riot had taken place. Despite Fox’s harangue and the judge’s patriotic charge, the jury acquitted Reed on the first vote, and, after two hours’ discussion, freed Kogerman as well. This was a clearer victory for freedom of speech than the Masses case. Fox told Wallerstein that it was one of the most dis­ astrous verdicts in the history of Philadelphia and insisted that the jurors were moved by fear of Bolshevik bombs. The liberal press, beginning to return to sanity, congratulated the court, Reed, and Wallerstein. Reed felt that Wallerstein deserved the credit. During the three or four days that Reed and Louise Bry­ ant spent in Philadelphia, they stayed in Wallerstein’s home, and Reed was filled with respect for this simple, unpretentious, hon­ est liberal. The Wallersteins, on their side, were delighted with his brilliant talk, and listened to tale after tale of adventure in Mexico and Europe. An ordeal that Reed had particularly dreaded had been trans­ formed into a pleasant and gratifying episode. The Masses in­ dictment had been dropped, and now, with acquittal in Phila­ delphia, and with the strong possibility that the Hunt’s Point Palace case would be quashed because of the end of the war, he felt relatively free. And when, on the nineteenth of March, Ten Days That Shook the World finally appeared, he had a strong sense of achievement. Many of the reviews were, of course, un­ favorable, but from all over the country came the only kind of praise that counted. Scores of Wobblies wrote him from Leav-

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enworth and other penitentiaries, telling him that this was the real thing. Walt Whitman’s friend, Horace Träubel, a revolu­ tionary veteran, wrote him, “I have great respect for all you do —and better still, for all you are.” A radical bookseller in Colo­ rado packed a hundred copies from mining camp to mining camp, and sold them all. Wherever Reed spoke to radical groups, he found that Ten Days was regarded as a kind of handbook of revolution. What did he care if Charles Edward Russell damned it in the New York Times? Passed from hand to hand, and read till the pages fell apart, the book was what he had wanted it to be—a weapon. “You are correct,” he said, in his letter to the Times, “when you call information about Russia Bolshevik prop­ aganda, for the great majority of persons who learn the truth about Russia become convinced Bolsheviki.” The statement may have been extravagant, but it would not be easy to compute the number of persons whose interest in Communism dates from the reading of Ten Days That Shook the World.

XIX Discipline

resignation from the Liberator, his work as contribut­ ing editor of the Revolutionary Age, and his close identification with the leaders of the left wing were natural stages in the transition from the task of giving information about Bolshevism in Russia to the task of organizing Bolshevism in America. It was an easy transition because Russia was the touch­ stone that divided the right from the left in the Socialist Party. In the winter of 1918-19, Bolshevism was the great topic of de­ bate, not so much between Socialists and one-hundred-percent Americans as between Socialists and Socialists. Joseph Shaplen was one of the few right-wing Socialists who had been in Russia during the revolution, and the Revolutionary Age invited him to debate with Reed. He refused, on the ground that the Revolutionary Age was fighting the Socialist Party; he would, he said, debate under the auspices of a Socialist local. It made little difference to Reed who sponsored the meeting, and on March 6, in the Manhattan Lyceum, the debate took place. Shaplen, of course, argued that the Bolshevik regime was undem­ ocratic. Reed replied, “The Bolsheviki believe in democracy of the working class, and no democracy for anybody else,” and proceeded to show the sensitiveness of the soviets to the will of the workers and peasants. He cited Marx’s views on the dictator­ ship of the proletariat, which Shaplen and other right-wing So­ cialists had contrived to forget, and offered statistics on the pro­ ductivity of industry under working-class control. In the heat of the debate Reed forgot the rules of parliamen­ tary procedure and used the last five minutes of his rebuttal to eed’s

R

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make personal charges against Shaplen. Shaplen, he alleged, had had Tsarist associations in Russia and had advocated American intervention. Shaplen, who could not answer Reed in the course of the debate, brought charges against him before the grievance committee of the New York local. In the meantime, the Phila­ delphia local, to which Shaplen belonged, was considering the charge that he was a counter-revolutionary. How sharp the cleavage had become had been made apparent by the publication, in the Revolutionary Age for February 8, of the manifesto and program of the left wing, to which Reed had helped give literary form. The manifesto announced that the left wing did not intend to split the Socialist Party but to make it truly Socialist. Explaining the collapse of the Second Interna­ tional during the war on the ground that it had been corrupted by bourgeois reformers and self-seeking trade-unionists, it de­ scribed the German Spartacists and the Russian Bolsheviks as the true followers of Marx. In the United States the end of the war had brought unemployment and a concerted capitalist effort to reduce the standard of living. The workers were answering the employers with militant strikes. In this surge of revolt lay the Socialist Party’s opportunity, but the leaders were too con­ cerned with their petty reforms to seize it. Whereas the syn­ dicalists were blind to the possibilities of political action, the reform Socialists misused political methods. The left wing pro­ posed a new policy, in both politics and industry, looking to­ wards the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of So­ cialism through a dictatorship of the proletariat. The strategy of the left wing was based on the assumption that a revolutionary crisis*was approaching in the United States. In Portland, Oregon, John Reed’s birthplace, a Council of Workers, Soldiers, and Sailors had been formed, proclaiming the class struggle, the bankruptcy of capitalism, and the coming seizure of power. The Soviet World of Philadelphia, hailing the Portland Council, predicted that the next two years would see the birth of the Socialist Soviet Republic of the United States of America. Nothing seemed impossible when one looked at Eu­ rope. Although reaction had triumphed in Finland and Poland, and moderate Socialists had strangled the revolutions in Ger­

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many and Austria, proletarian forces were still strong. In Hun­ gary, Bela Kun’s brief rule was about to begin, and the workers of Italy were seizing factory after factory. As for the United States, even without exaggerating the militancy of the workers at that particular moment, one who had seen Russia in 1915 and again in 1917 knew that docility might change to revolt in a year or a few months or, under sufficient pressure, a few weeks. Reed, hopeful as he was, was not the most sanguine member of the left wing. If the world revolution was beginning, sooner or later to reach this country, the policies of the officials of the Socialist Party were not merely stupid; they were a betrayal of the working class. Although the party had officially voted against war, many of its leaders, including the Socialist aidermen in New York City, had supported the government, endorsing liberty loan drives and other war measures. With the armistice, these officials had been chiefly concerned to preserve the party from the stigma of Bolshevism. To the members of the left wing, the whole policy of the Socialist Party leadership seemed to aim at suppression of the growing militancy. The left-wing leaders could not reach the membership through the party press nor through the ordinary organizational meth­ ods. The party had a machine, and the conservatives controlled it. Therefore the members of the left wing formed special units. The creation of the Communist Propaganda League of Chicago, the founding of the Revolutionary Age, and the issuing of the manifesto and program were steps in this process. And on Feb­ ruary 15, a left-wing section of the Socialist Party of Greater New York was officially organized at an all-day conference. Reed was appointed as the New York representative on the staff of the Revolutionary Age and was elected to the city committee of fifteen. Maximilian Cohen was elected executive secretary and Rose Pastor Stokes treasurer. The manifesto and program of the left wing were endorsed by many of the Socialist locals and by the Lettish, Russian, Lith­ uanian, Polish, Ukrainian, South Slavic, Hungarian, and Esthonian Federations, foreign-language groups which included a large proportion of the members of the Socialist Party. The

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movement towards the left wing was accelerated by the news that the Communist Party of Russia had issued a call for a con­ gress to form a new International, soon followed by information that the Third or Communist International had come into exist­ ence. The left wing immediately initiated a referendum for ad­ herence to this International. Members of the right wing were as determined as their op­ ponents. To them it was absurd to believe that a revolutionary crisis was at hand and wicked to suggest that power should be violently seized. Although they were as emphatic as the militants in affirming their desire for the destruction of capitalism, they could conceive of no other weapons than education and the slow achievement of parliamentary power. This being true, they re­ garded the program of the left wing as futile and its tactics as suicidal. The left wing began to call for a national emergency conven­ tion. It also entered candidates in the election of international delegates and members of the national executive committee, nominating Reed as an international delegate. He devoted more and more of his time to left-wing affairs, and meetings of the city committee were sometimes held in his home in Croton. To one meeting he brought Howard Scott, who, after expounding the unique importance of the engineer in the reconstruction of society, was distressed to find that the left-wing leaders clung to the old-fashioned opinion that the proletariat would have to make the revolution. At another meeting Reed unfolded a plan for rescuing Debs from jail, presenting it so vividly that, for an hour, the committee listened to every detail. Despite the liveliness of his mind, which had room for the notions of a Howard Scott and for schemes of jail-delivery, his comrades on the committee found Reed a devoted, informed revolutionary. Never a Marxist scholar, he was perfectly clear, thanks to his experiences in Russia, on the fundamentals of scien­ tific Socialism. And he had an extraordinary feeling for the working class. The kind of sympathy he had felt in Paterson and Ludlow had ripened into actual unity with the workers. He understood their point of view and the way their minds worked

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so completely that they never hesitated to accept him as one of themselves. With his understanding of the Marxist conception of classes and the struggle between them, Reed naturally speculated on the forces that had made him a traitor to his own class. He knew that Marx had foreseen the adherence of a certain section of the intelligentsia to the proletarian cause, and he could see how, in statistical terms, that could come about, but he was interested in what had happened to him as an individual. It was clear that his rebelliousness, which went back into his early boyhood, had much to do with it, and for that he could be grateful to the example of his father and perhaps to certain repressive influences in his environment. His passion for experience had also played a part, never allowing him to accept an easy, blinding routine. But rebelliousness and the desire for a richer life were characteristic of most of the writers of Reed’s generation. When he tried to decide why he, unlike most of the others, had taken the revolu­ tionary path to the fulfillment of their common hopes, he could only see that he had been fortunate in his experiences. The East Side, Paterson, Mexico, Ludlow, and the war had taught him much, preparing him for the crowning good fortune of being in Russia during the revolution. When Upton Sinclair called him “the playboy of the social revolution,” Reed was hurt. That he had been a playboy he was not inclined to deny, but he was not playing with revolution. He made little pretense to leadership, and was satisfied to do what­ ever work was assigned to him. The fact that he had been through the Russian revolution and had written of it so well in Ten Days That Shook the World made him enormously useful to the left wing, and he took his responsibilities as public spokes­ man with great seriousness. But he was unwilling to be merely a front; he did his share of the drudgery. Significantly, his greatest interest was in the actual technique of working-class control. In an article in the Revolutionary Age he pointed out that, despite the high efficiency of the American worker, control would be difficult because of the specialization of labor. He recommended the formation of shop-committees to study problems of production, manufacture, cost, and price.

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In this way the worker would discover the inefficiency of capi­ talism, realize the extent to which he was being robbed, and at the same time learn how to control the industry in which he worked. “It is not only necessary,” Reed wrote, “to plan the political downfall of the capitalist class, but also to get into the minds of the workers some conception of the industrial frame­ work which will underlie the new Socialist political common­ wealth.” If he had felt that he was unnecessary to the movement, his mail would have destroyed the notion. In the first three months of 1919 he received forty-four invitations to address meetings. There were a dozen letters from workers who were puzzled about this detail or that of the Socialist program. Russians asked him how to communicate with their families, and revolutionaries sought his help in getting into Russia. There was a Finnish boy, amazed because the Boston Transcript rejected his article on rev­ olution, who wanted Reed to help him get it published. A Span­ ish Jew, writing in French, offered to do translations from a Greek revolutionary paper. Such letters came every morning, and almost every morning there were letters of abuse that testi­ fied as unmistakably to his effectiveness. During February Reed was contemplating a lecture trip to the Pacific Coast. His mother, eager though she was to see him, urged him not to come to Portland, for “they are arresting Bol­ sheviks out here.” Irritated by the suggestion that only in Port­ land were Bolsheviks arrested, Reed replied sharply. Usually their affection for each other conquered the hostility that each felt for the other’s ideas, but this time disagreement flared into a quarrel. They were reconciled only when she learned that her brother-in-law, a general in the regular army, had been publicly attacking Reed. Reed did not make the trip, for, after the Overman hearing and the Philadelphia trial, he was occupied with the work of the left wing. Louise Bryant, however, left for the West early in March, speaking in Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, and St. Louis, and then in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and other cities on the Coast. A fortnight later Reed went as far as Minneapolis,

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addressing meetings in Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo, and Chicago, but he was back in Croton within ten days, writing Louise that the crocuses were up. One reason for remaining in the East was that he had, for the moment, profitable employment. Solon Fieldman, president of Press Forum, a newspaper service syndicate, asked Reed to take part in a debate on “Bolshevism—Promise or Peril?” Fieldman originally planned to secure Madame Breshkovskaya, or possibly Charles Edward Russell, as Reed’s opponent, but in the end Henry L. Slobodin, a Socialist who had withdrawn from the party because of the St. Louis declaration against war, took the assignment. After a definition and an outline had been agreed upon, each debater was to submit a first argument on the first topic. This was to be delivered to the other debater, who, in his second argument could both answer his opponent and introduce new material. The third argument was to serve purely as a re­ buttal. The topics proposed included internationalism, govern­ ment, democracy, militarism, industry, agriculture, the family, social welfare, education, religion, culture, and scientific prog­ ress, each in its relation to Bolshevism. Fieldman, who had had considerable success with smilar de­ bates, proposed to pay fifteen cents a word. Reed, though a little skeptical about the practical possibilities of the scheme, hired Fred Boyd as research-assistant and set to work. Slobodin was a rhetorician—he defined Bolshevism as “the maniac’s de­ lirium, the fool’s paradise, the apache’s valhalla”—and Reed had no difficulty in meeting his arguments. But he wanted to use to the full his opportunity to reach what Fieldman confidently as­ serted would be a large number of readers, and, though Boyd was thoroughly trained in Marxism and Reed had mastered the history of Bolshevism in Russia, both of them spent many hours in the library, documenting and sharpening Reed’s arguments. Reed worked on the debate through most of March, submit­ ting ten or twelve of the brief articles. They were accurate and logical, and he was justified in writing Louise Bryant, “The de­ bate with Slobodin is going very well; up to date he has said absolutely nothing, and I have him licked to a frazzle.” But by the end of the month Fieldman, discovering that newspapers

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were interested in only one side of that particular question, aban­ doned the plan. Reed, however, had been paid several hundred dollars, and had advanced a little further in the mastery of Marx­ ism. As much of his time as possible he spent in Croton. “How I hate to leave the country!” he wrote his wife, after describing “two hectic days in town, spent speaking at meetings, attend­ ing the executive committee of the left wing, and reading in the library for my debate.” Louise Bryant, in the meantime, had seen his family and was relieved to find them friendly. His brother Harry was disillusioned because his good war-record did not get him a job and had taken to selling securities. Mrs. Reed was hav­ ing financial difficulties, and some of the money Reed earned from his debate went to her. On the fourth of April the indictment in the Hunt’s Point Palace case was quashed, and Reed was for the moment a free man. Early in April he spoke at two meetings to welcome L. C. Martens, the representative of the Soviet government, and he went to Philadelphia for “Red Week.” On April 19, the New York Communist appeared, the official organ of the city’s left wing, with John Reed as editor, Eadmonn MacAlpine as asso­ ciate editor, and Maximilian Cohen as business manager. The edi­ torials set forth the position of the left wing, praised the Revolu­ tionary Age, endorsed the proposal for a national left-wing conference, and called for a demonstration on behalf of Debs. The paper was barred from the Rand School and condemned by officials of the Socialist Party. When the second issue appeared, a week later, the conserva­ tives, not content with controlling the Call, founded a paper of their own, called the New York Socialist. Adopting the jeering tone of its rival, it surpassed the Communist in personal attack. “A crisis has arisen in the Socialist Party,” it proclaimed. “An enemy has appeared within our ranks. At a time when unity of purpose and unity of action are prime necessities, this enemy has raised the black banner of anarchy among us. It is to meet this enemy that the Socialist is published.” Reed was described as “a well-known journalist who is in the party about six months.” Other left-wing leaders were condemned as anarchists, petty

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bourgeois, and criminals. Even the charge of Moscow gold was made. Reed’s new seriousness could not withstand the temptation that the Socialist offered. On May 17, the Socialist appeared and was sold as usual at the Rand School. Several thousand copies were distributed before it was discovered that this particular issue had been prepared, not by Berenberg, Waldman, and the regular staff, but by John Reed and Eadmonn MacAlpine. The leading article, printed under an exact replica of the Socialist heading, purported to be a speech delivered by Louis Waldman on April Fool’s Day. “I do not wish to descend to personalities,” Mr. Waldman was made to say. “This is not a matter of persons, but of principles. But let us call the roll of the so-called ‘leaders’ of the so-called ‘left wing.’ ” After denunciations of Hourwich, Larkin, Reed, MacAlpine, Gitlow, and Rose Pastor Stokes, and a learned exposition of Marxism, he continued: “You have heard here tonight a great deal of talk about insurrection, mass action, and the like. Well, comrades, you know me. I have been on every barricade so far erected in this country, and I shall be the first man to mount whatever barricades may be thrown up in the future.” He concluded with an attack on the left wing: “So evident is their intention to disrupt the party that it has been necessary to expel all left-wing branches and exclude the mem­ bers from any vote on party affairs. If this is not disrupting the party, what is?” The Socialist might be the fair butt of Reed’s humor, but the situation was not humorous and Reed knew it. On the one hand, there was the increasingly brutal repression of all radical activi­ ties. On May Day uniformed soldiers and sailors roamed through the streets of New York, breaking up meetings and beating So­ cialists. A group of them attacked the Call’s printing plant, injur­ ing a number of employees, while police stood by and watched them. In Boston the police openly cooperated with the mob that raided a peaceful procession, firing upon women and chil­ dren, and arresting more than one hundred of the marchers. In Cleveland, where more than twenty thousand workers marched, the police and the Loyal American League shot two men, se­

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verely injured at least a score, and arrested one hundred and fifty. And on the other hand, the revolutionary movement was split into two warring camps. So sharp had the conflict become that on May 21 Morris Hillquit, under the guise of counseling a peaceful separation of the two factions, gave the signal for the expulsion of the left wing. His article in the Call was intelli­ gent and adroit. He did not defend the Second International and he did not attack Russia. The failure of the European Social­ ist parties in the war he attributed to the opportunism of the labor movement. The great necessity, therefore, was the re­ education of labor, and for this the moment was ripe. But the left wing, which he described as “a purely emotional reflex of the situation in Russia,” stood in the way of this great program of propaganda. “I am opposed to it,” he declared, “not because it is too radical, but because it is essentially reactionary; not because it would lead us too far, but because it would lead us nowhere.” The preaching of reconciliation would be futile, for antagonism was too intense. Better for the comrades to sepa­ rate: “The time for action is near. Let us clear the decks.” The national executive committee of the Socialist Party, meet­ ing in Chicago in the last week of May, followed Hillquit’s in­ structions by expelling the entire Socialist Party of the state of Michigan and suspending seven foreign-language federations with a membership of thirty thousand. In explaining the suspen­ sion of the language federations, Adolph Germer, national execu­ tive secretary, called attention to the remarkable growth of these organizations, which had doubled their membership. This he regarded as a dangerous symptom, since their almost unanimous support of the left wing indicated that they could not rise above “nativistic and nationalistic prejudices.” The Michigan organiza­ tion was expelled because of two resolutions it had adopted, one forbidding its members to support reform measures, the other requiring speakers to take a firm and presumably hostile atti­ tude towards religion. Socialists in Michigan opposed to these two resolutions were urged to organize so that they could be represented at the national convention. A little later the Massa­ chusetts and Ohio charters were revoked, because a majority in

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both organizations had voted to affiliate with the left wing; in both states the right-wing minority was recognized. By these measures the national executive committee reduced the member­ ship of the Socialist Party to less than half of what it had been on May Day. The committee also ruled that the elections that had taken place were invalid. The left wing had elected all four international delegates—Reed receiving the largest number of votes—and twelve out of fifteen members of the national execu­ tive committee. The existing committee, which was supposed to retire June 30, announced that it would remain in office until the emergency convention, called for August 30. The members of the left wing were indignant. Reed was not amused by the irony of a leadership that defended democracy by disregarding the will of the majority and that used Tam­ many tactics to maintain its power; he was angry. He believed that the rank and file of the Socialist Party were ready for a new revolutionary policy. The adoption of this policy he re­ garded as important, whether the revolution came in five or in twenty-five years. It was easy for Hillquit to say that the leaders of the left wing were thinking in terms of Russia, and it was true that many of them advocated policies that were entirely inappropriate to the American situation. But the fundamental concepts of Leninism that Reed adhered to had not been created in the stress of the Bolshevik uprising; they had been stated by Lenin as early as 1901 in What Is to Be Done? They derived, indeed, from what Marx had said in The Civil War in France in 1871 and The Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875. Their first statement had been made by Marx and Engels in the Com­ munist Manifesto of 1848. Reed had known for a long time that it was the breakdown of capitalism that created a revolutionary situation, but he had learned in Russia that only a proletariat that was led by a disci­ plined, clear-thinking, Marxist party could take advantage of the breakdown. The Bolshevik Party of Russia had not suddenly sprung out of the chaos of the spring of 1917; it had been shaped for twenty years by Lenin’s Marxist insight, tested in the revolu­ tion of 1905, and prepared by a decade of action for its task. On the other hand, the kind of thinking that Hillquit, Germer,

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Waldman, and the other officials were doing, and the policies they recommended, had proven a failure in every country of Europe. It was foolish to argue as to when the revolution would come; the important thing was to prepare for it; certainly it would never come if no dhe was ready. In the first three months after publication, nine thousand copies of Ten Days That Shook the World were sold. The book had been surprisingly well reviewed in the Philadelphia Public Ledger, the Los Angeles Times, the New York American, the New York Sun, and the Review of Reviews. Several papers, fol­ lowing the lead of the New York Times, reviewed it with John Spargo’s Bolshevism, using Spargo to offset Reed. Others, adopt­ ing the tactics that Spargo himself employed in the Tribune, praised it as reporting but damned its interpretation. Only a few reviews were completely hostile: the Chicago Tribune's re­ viewer took the occasion to pray for the sudden death of Lenin and Trotsky, and the Boston Transcript's asked why Liveright had stooped so low as to publish the volume. With the May 15 issue of the New York Communist, Reed began a series of articles entitled, “Why Political Democracy Must Go.” Like all of his theoretical writing, the series was not brilliant, but it was serious and thoughtful. The first article traced the rise of the labor movement, interpreting the policies of the A.F. of L. in terms of American economic conditions. The second, concerned with Socialism in America, was a brief historical survey, preparing the way for the discussion in the third and fourth of parliamentary Socialism and the failure of Congressmen London and Berger and Mayors Lunn and Van Lear. The last two articles described the capitalist nature of the state, both in terms of the origin of the nation and in terms of the contemporary situation. Sketchy as the articles were, they showed Reed’s appreciation of Marxism as a method of interpreting history and his under­ standing of the importance of re-examining the American past. He knew far too little about American history—one of the sub­ jects that his preparatory school teachers had managed to make hopelessly dull—to construct a convincing analysis, but he had

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caught a glimpse of the interplay of social forces in the growth of the United States. And in the closing articles, as well as in another piece he wrote for the Communist, “The I.W.W. and Bolshevism,” he showed how thoroughly he had learned the les­ son of the Russian revolution. Repeating the arguments of Lenin’s State and Revolution, he defended the dictatorship of the proletariat as the necessary instrument of the revolution—in Russia, the United States, or anywhere else. On June 16 he went to Atlantic City for the convention of the American Federation of Labor. The convention had met on June 9, with the usual congratulatory telegram from the Pres­ ident of the United States and the usual attack on the Reds by Gompers. There was much debate on a motion for the recogni­ tion of Russia, and Wilfred Humphries attempted to get the floor to tell about the Soviet government. Failing in this, he arranged a separate meeting on Russia, and wired Reed, asking him to come and speak. Unfortunately, Humphries innocently hired a hall in a non-union hotel, and the officials, using this as an excuse, demanded a boycott of the meeting. There was a fair attendance, but with very few delegates. The next day the con­ vention voted to urge the withdrawal of troops from Europe, especially Russia, but defeated the motion for recognition. The few days at Atlantic City gave Reed the first rest he had had in many months, and—far more important to him than rest —a chance to swim. With Carl Sandburg, who was reporting the convention for the Chicago Daily News, Bill Gropper, and Louis Stark, he went swimming twice a day. There was also an oppor­ tunity for a satirical expression of the contempt he had long felt for the leadership of the federation. In an article for the Liberator, illustrated by Bill Gropper, he described Gompers, sitting in his “tall, carved, grand-ducal chair,” as “the most grotesque figure that ever presided at any human gathering—squat, with the face of a conceited bull-frog, the sparse gray hair hanging from his bald head in wisps, as if it were glued on.” After portraying the officials one by one, he summed them up: “They were ex­ pensively dressed, and their figures portly. Long absence from their trades had filled out the hollows of their cheeks, leaving heavy jowls, and the strong lines made by hard work coarsened

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and overlaid with self-indulgent fat. Sinister suggestions of graft, of murderous violence bought and paid for, of political trading, of strikes betrayed, union treasuries looted, hung about them.” And with all the sharp vividness there was sound analysis. He called the article “The Convention of the Dead.” Reed returned to New York for the left-wing conference, which had been initiated by revolutionary groups in Boston and Cleveland. It began on June 21 with ninety-four delegates from twenty states in attendance. William Bross Lloyd, of Chi­ cago, was chosen chairman, and Reed was elected to the com­ mittee on labor. The report of the committee, which was accepted by the conference, stated: “The purpose of the left­ wing organization is to create a revolutionary working-class movement in America, which, through the action of the working masses themselves, will lead to workers’ control of industry and the state, as the only means of expropriating capitalist prop­ erty and abolishing classes in society. . . . With the legislatures, courts, police, and armies under control of the capitalists, the workers can only win the state power by extra-parliamentary action, which must have its basis in the industrial mass action of the workers.” The report called for revolutionary industrial unionism, the organization of shop-committees and workers’ councils, and the formation of a permanent labor committee with the power to issue a general propaganda periodical for the special purpose of reaching workers on their jobs. Reed was appointed to this committee and was given charge of the paper it proposed to publish. Although there was no disagreement about revolutionary principles, the conference of the left wing was not harmonious. Certain delegates, especially those who represented the foreignlanguage federations, had despaired of winning over the Socialist Party, and proposed to issue at once a call for a convention to organize a Communist Party. Reed hotly opposed this, believing that it was still possible to depose the bureaucrats of the party and to re-organize it as a revolutionary instrument. The call for a separate convention would, he argued, antagonize those mem­ bers who, without supporting the policies of the right wing, de­ sired to preserve the unity of the party.

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The proposal for the immediate organization of a new party was defeated by a vote of fifty-five to thirty-eight. Thirty-one delegates, representing the Slavic federations and the state of Michigan, withdrew from the conference. Reed and the other members of the majority went on with their plans for forging a revolutionary party. Before the conference adjourned on June 24, it elected a national council to conduct its affairs in the interval before the emergency convention of August 30. It also announced another left-wing conference, to meet in Chicago August 31, which would support the Socialist Party if the left wing had won control, and otherwise would organize a Com­ munist Party. As a theoretical basis for the activities of the left wing, the council issued a long manifesto, analyzing the effects of the war, the collapse of the Second International, the develop­ ment of Socialism in America, and the rise of the left wing, and discussing the problems of political and industrial action and the nature of proletarian dictatorship. On July 7, the group that had withdrawn from the left-wing conference published in Novy Mir a call for a national conven­ tion to organize a Communist Party. It attacked the majority of the left wing as “centrists, struggling for a false unity.” The majority, in reply, charged the minority with desertion. Fraina, writing in the Revolutionary Age, pointed out that the majority had always intended to organize a new party if it proved im­ possible to rescue the Socialist Party from the right wing, and jeered at the inconsistency of the alliance between the Slavic federations and what he called the Menshevik Michigan organ­ ization. The minority proceeded to issue a paper, which they called the Communist, the New York Communist having been combined with the Revolutionary Age. “Those who realize,” this new Communist said, “that the capturing of the Socialist Party as such is but an empty victory will not hesitate to respond to our call and leave the right and center to sink together with their ‘revolutionary’ leaders.” So bitterness grew. Reed pawned his watch and he and Louise went to Truro on Cape Cod for a few weeks with their Port­ land friends, Carl and Helen Walters, who had recently come east. For a little while he seemed as carefree as he had ever been,

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spending long hours swimming and lying on the dunes. He did not spend much time with the people in Provincetown, but he walked over one evening to talk with Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook. “I wish I could stay here,” he said. “Maybe it will surprise you, but what I really want is to write poetry.” They asked him why he didn’t. “I’ve promised too many people,” he said. It was true: John Reed was committed. He could not turn back now; all he could do was to look ahead. He regretted noth­ ing, knowing that he could not have done differently. Indeed, he had constantly enjoyed himself. But all this activity was ex­ traneous to his main purpose. It was necessary, and he had to do his share, but he longed for a time when it would be possible not merely for him but for all poets to write poetry. He could not stay long in Truro; there was too much to be done in New York. After the combination of the New York Communist with the Revolutionary Age, he was at first, because of a misunderstanding, not a member of the staff, but Fraina soon made him a contributing editor with a salary. At the same time he made preparations for the first issue of the Voice of Labor, the journal of the labor committee of the left wing, and wrote for it a long article on shop committees in Russia. At the end of July the unofficial executive committee, made up of the left-wing Socialists who had received the majority vote in the spring elections, met in Chicago. It announced that Reed, Fraina, Ruthenberg, and Wagenknecht had been elected inter­ national delegates and Kate Richards O’Hare international secre­ tary. Germer, the official executive secretary, was requested to turn over national headquarters to this committee, and a motion was passed, stating, “We declare the office of national executive secretary vacant, inasmuch as the present incumbent violates his functions by refusing to tabulate the vote on referendums ex­ pressing the will of the membership, and refuses to recognize the regularly elected N.E.C.” Alfred Wagenknecht was appointed temporary executive secretary. The committee also voted to re­ instate the expelled and suspended organizations and to affiliate with the Communist International.

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All this was, of course, merely a gesture, but a significant one insofar as it showed a determination to carry out to the end the attempt to capture the Socialist Party. Since several members of this unofficial national executive committee were also members of the national council of the left wing, which represented the majority group at the June conference, the council seemed to be further committed to the policy the conference adopted. But almost immediately after the new N.E.C. meeting, representa­ tives of the council began negotiations with representatives of the Slavic federations, who made certain compromises. The result was a majority vote in the national council to support the call for a Communist Party convention. Although the council con­ tinued to urge left-wing members to attend the emergency con­ vention of the Socialist Party, the fact that they were committed to a separate convention and the organization of a new party, regardless of the outcome of the Socialist convention, meant that their old position had been abandoned. On August 23, the Revolutionary Age carried the joint call for a Communist Party convention, to be held in Chicago Sep­ tember i. The same issue announced the resignation of Reed, Gitlow, and MacAlpine in protest against the action of the national council. The members of the council who signed the joint call, Ruthenberg, Fraina, Cohen, and the others, justified their action on the ground that it was the only way to preserve the unity of the left wing. To Reed, however, it seemed a funda­ mental abandonment of principle. Not only did he believe that the plan of working as long as possible within the Socialist Party was sound; he held that the national council had been committed to this program by all the preparations for the left-wing con­ ference, by the conference itself, and by the steps that had been taken since the conference. Certainly the joint call did not achieve the unity of the left wing. The Slavic federations, the officials of the expelled Michi­ gan organization of the Socialist Party, and now the majority of the National Council of the Left Wing had agreed that a Communist Party must be formed. But the minority of the coun­ cil was opposed to this decision, and in this respect the minority almost certainly represented a majority of the members of the

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left wing, exclusive of those who belonged to the Slavic federa­ tions. Moreover, the left wing had had many sympathizers who remained in the Socialist Party, and there were many other members who might in time have been won for a Communist program. The decision to form a Communist Party, without waiting for whatever action might be taken by the national emergency convention of the Socialist Party, confused and offended a number of these sympathizers, and the animosity that developed between the two factions of the left wing completed their alienation. That was the situation when, on August 30, the national emergency convention, the first to be held since the St. Louis meeting in 1917, opened in Chicago. Reed and some eighty mem­ bers of the left wing arrived early at Machinists’ Hall and held a caucus, in which it was decided that they should simply invade the convention without arguing about credentials. “The way to get the hall,” Reed said, “is to go and get it.” They marched upstairs and were met at the door by Julius Gerber, secretary of the New York local, who had charge of seating arrangements. An altercation followed, in which talk led to a brief flourish of fists. One observer remarked that Gerber could have licked Reed if Reed hadn’t held him so far up in the air that he couldn’t reach down. Gerber was reported to have said that he made Reed understand that swinging a sledge-hammer with the prole­ tariat was as good training as playing football in college. In any case, Reed and his left-wing followers entered the hall. A few minutes later Adolph Germer, national executive secre­ tary, arrived, accompanied by two policemen. After requesting the left-wing delegates to leave, he turned to the officers and asked them to clear the hall. Once Reed and his followers had been ejected, Germer declared the convention open. There was applause when he said, “We intend to follow the splendid example set by our comrades in Russia,” but silence met his qualification, “I want it distinctly understood that we do not intend to adopt the same methods.” Much of his speech con­ sisted in proving by references to the St. Louis platform that the party was really revolutionary. The leaders of the left wing he denounced as thieves and gangsters.

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While Jack Reed, hatless and wearing a picturesque Norfolk jacket, led the expelled delegates to another room downstairs, the convention proceeded to elect a temporary chairman. Sey­ mour Stedman was the candidate of the right wing and J. M. Coldwell of the left. The party, it should be remembered, had been reduced from 109,589 members to 39,750, and the expelled members were all supporters of the left wing. Every delegation, moreover, had been carefully scrutinized, and several had been unseated though they came from states that had not been ex­ pelled. Finally, the national executive committee had permitted the right wing in expelled states to elect the number of dele­ gates to which the membership of January 1 would have en­ titled them, so that, for example, Michigan’s 139 right-wing So­ cialists had seven delegates, the quota due 3500. And in spite of all this, Coldwell received thirty-seven votes to Stedman’s eighty-eight. Even after Coldwell had marched out thirty delegates, in protest against the refusal of the convention to make the exam­ ination of contested elections the first order of business, there remained considerable sentiment against the party bureaucracy. Again and again delegates protested against the use of police. “I just heard one of these policemen threaten to throw a com­ rade downstairs,” a delegate stated, “and he said, ‘You won’t light on your feet either, you’ll think you came down in an air­ plane.’ I ask you if this is the way visiting Socialists are going to be treated by this convention.” “What kind of Socialists are they?” a New York official asked. The Chicago machinists, in whose hall the convention was meeting, protested against the presence of police. Claessens, Hoan, and Berger defended Germer’s action. “We in Milwaukee,” Berger said, “would have done it a good deal better than Germer did, because we have our own police. If the police had not been here, we would not be here now. The two-fisted Reed and the other two-fisted left wingers would be here.” The remainder of the sessions were for the most part devoted to self-justification on the part of the officials. Judge Panken of New York denounced the left wing as “a bunch of anarchists,” and other speakers followed his lead. Nevertheless, the conven­

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tion refused to be satisfied by the national executive commit­ tee’s explanation of its expulsions and suspensions and voted an investigation. It also voted to bring before the membership by referendum a minority as well as a majority report on inter­ national relations. The ifiinority report called for affiliation with the Communist International, whereas the other proposed the formation of a new international, which the Communist Party of Russia should be invited to join. A national executive com­ mittee, composed with one exception of new members, was elected. While the regular convention was proving how much militancy existed among the rank and file, the left-wing delegates, includ­ ing both those who had been expelled and those who had left in protest, met, on the evening of the thirty-first, in another room of the same building. There was no machine here, and the session was often disorderly, but it was enthusiastic, spontaneous, alive. The gathering proclaimed itself the true national emer­ gency convention of the Socialist Party, and elected Owens of Illinois as chairman. After sending greetings to Debs and the other class-war prisoners, the delegates discussed the question of left-wing unity. C. E. Ruthenberg, who was present despite the fact that he had signed the Communist call, urged the delegates not to organize a party until after the Communist Party conven­ tion had met. This raised the issue that was uppermost in many minds, the issue of submission to the Slavic federations. Jack Carney declared that, if the convention went over to the federa­ tions, he would go home and tell the workers of Duluth that there was no revolutionary party in existence. Reed proposed to amend Ruthenberg’s suggestion by proclaiming this the party of Communism and inviting all other revolutionary groups to join it. With some changes, his motion was adopted. The next morning, while Reed’s group proceeded to the routine business of electing committees, the Communist Party opened its sessions. Just as Dennis E. Batt, one of the Michigan delegates, was about to proclaim the convention opened, police arrived, arrested Batt, and destroyed decorations and placards. Rose Pastor Stokes cried, “They are arresting our comrades—

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three cheers for the revolution.” “Shut up,” the police-sergeant shouted; “it’s always a woman that starts the trouble.” The Communist Party convention showed no desire to con­ ciliate the other section of the left wing, and Reed and his as­ sociates felt there was nothing to do but form a separate party. On September 2 this was done. The delegates, meeting in the I.W.W. hall on Throop Street, proclaimed themselves the Com­ munist Labor Party. John Reed was made chairman of the com­ mittee to draw up a program, and it was his report that precipi­ tated the principal struggle of the convention. For this gathering, too, was divided. On the ope hand, there were those who wanted to create a revolutionary party, based on the teachings of Marx and guided by the experience of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. On the other were persons who had left the Socialist Party chiefly as a protest against the high-handed conduct of its officials, and who were a little afraid of too concrete a commitment to revo­ lution. Reed’s program called for the training of the working class for the seizure of power. Margaret Prevey was among those who objected. “We must use political power in order to get a hear­ ing for the working class,” she insisted. “I want to see a workingclass judge to pass sentence upon the workers, a working-class jailor to open the doors of the prisons for the working class. I want to see the working class get control of the police and the United States army, so that they can be used on the side of the workers, instead of against them in their industrial battles.” Reed rose, gave a hitch to his pants, and answered her in his one burst of oratory. “When the Socialist mayor of Minneap­ olis,” he told her, “wanted to use the police to protect the meeting of the workers, his policemen were superseded by a body of special deputies appointed by the governor of the state. When a radical governor of Illinois, Governor Altgeld, tried to use the state power to protect the workers in the Pullman strike in Chicago, Grover Cleveland sent the United States army into Illinois to protect capital. And if you had a Socialist president in the place of Grover Cleveland, the Supreme Court would come to the protection of capital. And if you had a Socialist Supreme Court, J. P. Morgan would organize a volunteer White Guard,

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and the interests of capital would still be protected. So it will always be. The struggle is between economic forces and cannot be settled on the political field.” Another of Reed’s opponents was Louis Boudin, of New York, famed as a student of Marx. Boudin laughed at one of the phrases Reed had incorporated in the platform. Reed said noth­ ing, but left the building, returning with a copy of the Com­ munist Manifesto, in which he showed Boudin the precise words to which he had objected. Boudin was completely routed when Ben Gitlow rose, and accused him of using his knowledge of Marx to destroy the integrity of the platform. In its fundamen­ tals, Reed’s program was adopted. “Wonderful convention,” he wired Louise Bryant that night; “everything going fine.” After that, after it had been decided that the Communist Labor Party was a revolutionary party, the sessions did go smoothly, so smoothly that they sometimes failed to hold Reed’s interest. One afternoon he got hold of Sherwood Anderson, who was living in Chicago, and showed him some unpublished poems. Anderson liked them, and his saying so pleased Reed. After they had talked for a time in a toilet, in the convention building, Reed said, “Hell, Sherwood, they’ve got to the resolu­ tions stage up there; let’s go out in the park.” They walked for half an hour, talking about poetry, until Reed said, “Well, well, that’s enough of this. I guess I’d better get back in there and see what’s doing.” The party accepted the principles of the Third International, proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat as its aim, and adopted a program of action. Although its manifesto differed in no fundamental way from that of the Communist Party, nego­ tiations for the merger of the two groups were futile. The Slavic federations, even after the English-speaking delegates to the Communist convention had brought strong pressure, would agree to no compromise that threatened their power. After elect­ ing officers, with Wagenknecht as executive secretary and Reed as an international delegate, and after making a standing offer to discuss unity with the Communist Party, the convention of the Communist Labor Party adjourned. Returning to New York, Reed, though troubled by the divi­

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sion of revolutionary forces, was elated. In the conventions he had felt the stirring of the revolutionary spirit in America, and he had no doubt that unity would soon be achieved. The con­ vention of the Communist Labor Party, because it had been so loosely organized, had given him a constant sense of the up­ welling of spontaneous zeal. At the same time, discipline, whose importance he had learned to recognize, had not been absent. It had given him satisfaction to be a part of all this, and not an un­ important part. He felt that things were moving, and he was glad.

XX Revolutionary’s Return

two or three weeks Reed spent most of his time in the New York office of the Communist Labor Party. Although two months remained before the party was outlawed by the United States government, the operations of the city police, federal agents, vigilantes, and the Lusk committee forced Reed and his companions to work with as much secrecy as possible. Carlo Tresca, who was editing an Italian paper in a deserted building on Twelfth Street, invited them to share his hiding­ place with him, and an issue of the Voice of Labor was brought out in this vacant loft. Every night there were meetings, held in the homes of sympathizers, at which Reed reported on the con­ vention. The conflict between the two Communist parties sent Reed to Russia late in September. Each party was convinced that it was truly Communist and that the other was the obstacle to unity of the revolutionary forces. Since both parties were eager to affiliate with the Communist International, and since the rec­ ognition of one by the International would discredit the other, both hastened to send emissaries to Moscow. Reed, as a regularly elected international delegate, was chosen to represent the Com­ munist Labor Party. All this was decided in the three weeks after his return from Chicago. They were busy weeks, spent in attending committee meetings, speaking to little groups of sympathizers, writing arti­ cles, publishing the Voice of Labor, and dodging the police. Don Marquis, riding on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, caught sight of Reed on the street, and got off to speak to him. When Marquis asked him what he was doing, Reed laughed and said 365 or

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he was in hiding. “This is the dickens of a place to hide,” Mar­ quis said. “None better,” Reed told him, “and besides, the redhunters never catch anybody.” George Falconer, the Denver Socialist who had sold Ten Days That Shook the World on a trip through the Rocky Mountains, found Reed in Croton one afternoon, in the cabin he used for writing. He brought him a message from Haywood, sick in Leavenworth. Reed showed him the great piles of Russian maga­ zines and pamphlets and talked to him about Lenin, and they toasted Lenin and Bobby Bums in Scotch whiskey. There were a hundred things Reed wanted to do. He wanted to write poetry. (In her listing of the year’s awards Harriet Monroe had given honorable mention to “Proud New York,” the fragment of “America, 1918” she had published in Poetry.) He wanted to write From Kornilov to Brest-Litovsky his second book about the Russian revolution. He wanted to build the Communist Labor Party. But what he had to do, what the mo­ ment obviously demanded of him, was to return to Russia. He was not sorry that he would find out what the Bolsheviks had done in a year and a half, and he was as eager as any one else to win for the Communist Labor Party the recognition of the International, but he would not have chosen to return at just that time. The decision was taken out of his hands; he was doing his revolutionary duty. There was no possibility, of course, of his going as a passen­ ger or under his own name. He went as a stoker on a Scandina­ vian ship. A few friends accompanied him to the dock, and he was full of laughter at his rough clothes and the bundle slung over his shoulder. It was nine years since he had last worked his way across the Atlantic, on the cattleboat Bostonian. He was a different John Reed, and in body as well as mind, for he had never entirely recovered from the removal of his kidney, and irregular habits of eating, drinking, and sleeping had weakened him. It would be a different kind of voyage, too: no tents on deck, no special favors, no extra food; just the ordinary fare of an ordinary stoker. But he was as gay as if he were a college boy starting out for a summer’s sport, not a police-hunted revo­ lutionary, bound for a land of famine and civil war, which he

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could reach only by passing through the hostile armies that surrounded it. It was a slow and arduous trip across the ocean, but Reed found that the hard work agreed with him. Jim Gormley was the name on his seaman’s identification card, and his companions in the stokehold had no complaints about Jim’s doing his share of the work. They knew that he was not altogether what he pretended to be, but that did not trouble them. They were not particularly surprised when, at Bergen, he went ashore and did not come back. It was not the first time such things had hap­ pened. Reed reached Christiania in the middle of October, and imme­ diately got in touch with left-wing Socialists in the city. He found that the police had become more vigilant in arresting men without proper credentials, and of course even Jim Gorm­ ley’s papers were not in order since his desertion of the ship. As quickly as possible, he placed the documents he was carrying in safe keeping, and then devoted himself, before he took the next stage of his trip, to discovering the situation in Norway and the rest of Europe. Before he left Christiania, he managed to send a letter to Louise Bryant by courier, a strange letter, full of personal en­ dearments for her and of news for the leaders of the C.L.P. “From now on,” he wrote, “it seems to me we must never be separated. . . . This is not altogether a joke trip, but more or less a grim business. ... The Communist Party will get no sym­ pathy here or anywhere in Scandinavia. I am the big cheese in these parts.... The Voica of Labor is greatly admired here.. . . I was never in better health and am doing well. . . . Write me very seldom. Inform mother I am well. Back before Christmas, I hope.” But the body of the letter described political conditions. The Russian situation he called heartrending. The report that Yudenitch had taken Petrograd, which he had heard on his arrival in Christiania, had been denied by the time he wrote, but the city had nearly fallen. Denikin, moreover, was within two hundred and fifty miles of Moscow. “In Hungary,” he wrote, “thanks to the American Food Controller, who smashed the Hungarian

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Soviet government, there is at present the most terrible white terror.” In Germany, on the other hand, the Communists seemed to be gaining. In Norway and Sweden the left wing controlled the Socialist Party, but, he explained, “there can be no revolu­ tion in Scandinavia and other small countries until the great capitalist countries go, for these small countries have to import their food and could be starved at once.” On the night of October 22, Reed crossed the boundary into Norway on foot. In Christiania he had met Hungarians, Finns, Russians, and Letts who had performed prodigies of heroism in going to and from Russia. They told him of comrades who had been shot and others who had been arrested. But he reached Stockholm without mishap, and remained there for more than a week. Again he studied the revolutionary forces, and again he realized the peculiar complexity of the situation. Once more he managed to write Louise, mingling expressions of his affection and his sorrow at their separation with news of radical progress in Scandinavia and of developments in Russia. And as usual he made new friends, friends who would always remember him de­ spite the briefness of their meeting. On the first of November, comrades helped him to stow away on a ship bound for Finland. All through the hours of that Baltic crossing he lay huddled in a pile of greasy rags, without food or drink. When the ship was near Abo, he climbed, as he had been instructed, into a shaft that led from the engine-room to the deck, and for four hours he clung to the rails of the ladder. Gusts of hot air came from below, and as the steam condensed on the brass plate above his head, drops of water fell on him. Feet shuf­ fled across the plate, and he could hear men talking and cough­ ing. Once there was the gleam of flashlights below him—Finnish police looking for just such stowaways as he. At last he heard somebody hiss sharply in the silence below. Stiff and dizzy he climbed down. A match was lighted, and he found his overcoat in the pile of rags. “Quick, Christ’s sake, quick!” a voice said. A hand took his, and he mounted a ladder and a companion-way, and came out on the snowy deck. Two steam-cranes were dipping into the forward hold, and longshore-

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men were heaving at great packing-cases, said to be parts of tanks to be used in the attack on Petrograd. Seeing soldiers and policemen on the dock, Reed remembered that this was Finland, land of the broken revolution, country of bourgeois terror. Two workmen were supposed to be on the dock to meet him. They would recognize him from a descrip­ tion that had been given them, and, when they saw him, they would walk away. He was to follow. He saw workmen, but there were half a dozen of them, and none seemed to be look­ ing for him. His guide led him to the gangway, saw a policeman, and pulled him back. As they retreated, Reed felt the hand in his trembling. Hurrying through the ship, they came at last to the cargo-deck, where men were rigging the tackle of the great cranes. “Go,” his companion whispered, and pushed Reed into the busy throng of men. He walked across the gangplank, shoving past the customs officials as if he were one of the crew attending to his job. A policeman eyed him suspiciously, but he hurried on. Two men detached themselves from a group of loafers and walked away. Reed followed, pulling his coat collar about his black, oily face. In the little market-square he saw two young men in shining boots, long, dark gray coats with green facings, swords, and peaked caps. On his left arm each had a broad white band, with a monogram in a black circle—S.K., symbol of the Salvation Corps, the bourgeois militia which had provoked the red insur­ rection and then, with the help of the Germans, ruthlessly put it down, murdering twenty thousand workers after they had surrendered. * The men Reed was following walked steadily on, through wide, rough-cobbled streets, until at last they came to the out­ skirts of the town. They looked back over their shoulders, but made no sign. When they turned into a court-yard gate, he went after them into a dimly lighted little hall-way. Frightened and surprised, they stared at him. “Woodrow Wilson,” he said, giving the appointed password. They looked at him in bewilder­ ment, and one of them sharply asked a question in Finnish. “Woodrow Wilson,” Reed said again, and gave the name of the boat he had come on. They shook their heads. One of them

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muttered to the other, who unlocked a door. In a moment they were inside, and Reed heard the key turn. He was alone, without a passport, in a country whose lan­ guage he did not know, and whose government was bitterly hostile to Russia, and he had failed to find his guides. There was nothing to do but go back to the dock, risking arrest, and look for the right men. This time he found them, frantic with anx­ iety, and they took him to the home of a Finnish writer, woman whose Bolshevik sympathies were not suspected. She fed him and put him in bed, and a day or two later helped him to reach Helsingfors. In Helsingfors there was another comfortable home for him to stay in. He was impatient because he had been so long de­ layed, but he learned that it had been fortunate. Sudden police raids had captured the entire Communist organization in Viborg, and if he had been there, he would certainly have been jailed. Because of the disorganization of Viborg, there was nothing for him to do but remain for a fortnight in Helsingfors. He man­ aged to write another letter to Louise, sending it by a messenger to be mailed in Stockholm. “I fret and fume,” he wrote, “at my delay, and spend my time thinking of my honey and wanting her.” He told of two Norwegian intellectuals who had praised her Six Red Months in Russia, “I have told everybody how my honey broke the Overman blockade,” he said, “and shall tell at headquarters. Am very well and happy and still expect to be with you before Christmas. Don’t try to come this way. It would be ghastly for you just now.” While Reed waited impatiently in Finland, his departure was discovered in New York. On November 8, led by the Lusk com­ mittee, seven hundred policemen raided seventy-one Communist Party and Communist Labor Party headquarters in New York City, seizing several tons of literature and arresting thirty-five men. Examination of C.L.P. records revealed that Reed was on his way to Moscow. This Lusk committee onslaught followed by one day A. Mitchell Palmer’s raid on the Russian People’s House, in which hundreds of Russian workmen were beaten with blackjacks. The series of raids, arrests, deportations, hys­ terical convictions, and long sentences that was to mark the

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winter of 1919-20 had begun. It was not only in Finland that there was a white terror. At last the time came when the comrades felt that it was safe for Reed to move towards the Finnish-Russian front. Passed on from sympathizer to sympathizer, he was guided safely through the lines, and finally he reached the headquarters of the Red Army. In the quarters of the agitation committee there were several young men and a girl, who welcomed Reed. An officer, who lay asleep across four chairs, woke up and greeted him. The girl made coffee. Reed was tired, but it was so cold that he could not sleep. The officer lay down again on the chairs, waking from time to time as sentries arrived to make their reports. All through the night there was the sound of firing not far off. Occasionally one of the men spoke to Reed, but they all seemed busy with their various duties. Reed gathered that they were engaged in smuggling supplies from Finland. After the girl explained that the coffee was all gone, he sat and shivered until morning. Soon after sunrise he was driven in a sleigh to the railroad. Along the road cavalry and artillery were marching towards the front, and there were sentries every few hundred yards. For miles camouflage experts had been at work, creating the ap­ pearance of a great forest, to protect the road. The station was crowded, mostly with soldiers. Reed noticed that, where the shrine used to be, there were revolutionary proclamations and posters. When the train came, his companions bade him fare­ well, and he started on the last stage of his journey to Petrograd. It was nearly two years since he had left it, and during those years the country had been constantly at war. Scarcely had the treaty of Brest-Litovsk been signed when a brigade of Czecho­ slovak troops, moving from Kiev to Vladivostok, with the intention of sailing for France, had involved themselves in hostil­ ities against the Soviets and had become the center of counter­ revolutionary organization. Allied intervention had quickly fol­ lowed, and Archangel and Murmansk had been captured in the summer of 1918. After the signing of the armistice, the French and British governments had been able to give more support to the anti-Bokhevik forces, and in the spring of 1919 Kolchak

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drove far into Soviet territory in Siberia, and Denikin pushed northward from the Black Sea. It was the concentration of the Red Army on these fronts that made impossible the sending of aid to the Soviet governments in Hungary and the Baltic coun­ tries, with the result that they were overthrown by bourgeois forces, supported by the Allies. While Reed was on his way from America, a change had come. Archangel and Murmansk were abandoned in the early autumn, and Yudenitch’s surprise attack on Petrograd was re­ pulsed by an outpouring of the city’s workers. Denikin’s ad­ vance on Moscow was checked, and his defeat made possible the recapture of the Ukraine. With the collapse of Kolchak’s army, Allied intervention in Siberia was almost at an end. The Soviet government had been saved, but at a dreadful cost. Not only had Communism been defeated in the countries to the west; Russia itself was so weakened that the winter of 1919-20 would be the most terrible in its history. To all the inevitable difficulties of the organization of Socialism had been added the burden of civil war—the loss of life, the disorganization of the food supply, and the concentration of industry on war prepara­ tions. France and England, fearing disorders at home, had not dared to send sufficient troops to destroy the Soviets, but they did great damage, and their blockade, which continued, de­ prived Russia of the supplies that it needed for reconstruction. From Petrograd Reed went on to Moscow, where he imme­ diately presented the case for the Communist Labor Party to the executive committee of the International. He found the leaders changed. Lenin, especially, was more genial. He chuckled and gestured as he talked, and hitched up his chair until his knees touched Reed’s. But his eyes were as terrible as ever, and Reed felt them boring through him. Trotsky and Kamenev both were plumper. Kamenev reminded Reed of a cocker spaniel and Karakhan of a heavy in the movies. They all listened carefully to what he had to say about America, particularly Lenin, who seemed to know exactly what was happening. The executive committee offered him the privileges ordinarily extended to distinguished guests, a special apartment and better food, but he refused, taking a room in the working-class sec-

4.

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tion of the city and preparing his own meals on a little iron stove. He was eager to return to America, but first there had to be an extended discussion of the party situation, and in the meantime he used his opportunity to see what the new Russia was like. It was a cruel winter in Moscow. There was never quite enough food. The soldiers were given the best possible treat­ ment, and the factory employees were organized to take care of themselves. Clerical workers, however, were often over­ looked, and Reed pitied them. Because of the blockade, there were almost no medical supplies, and sanitary conditions were bad and epidemics common. Although the terror, which had been necessary to suppress counter-revolution, was relaxing, stories still came of the horrors of civil warfare. Reed was constantly impressed by the heroism of the workers. The day after Christmas, he went to Serpukov to speak to dele­ gates of all the factory shop-committees in that section. Men came from miles away, some walking twenty versts through the deep snow. In the great white hall that had once been the Nobles’ Club they gathered, their faces gaunt and their clothes ragged, to listen to Reed talk about America. They asked him countless questions, about wages, bread, working conditions. “What do American workers think of us?” they asked, and “Why is America so slow to get Socialist ideas?” Reed stood there, the one dim kerosene light shining on his face, and talked. When he finished, a young worker jumped up and proposed a resolution: “Tell our brothers in America that for three years the Russian workers have been bleeding and dying for the rev­ olution, and not our own revolution, but the world revolution. Tell our American comrades that we listen day and night for the sound of their footsteps coming to our aid. But tell them, too, that no matter how long it may take them, we shall hold firm. Never shall the Russian workers give up their revolution. We die for Socialism, which perhaps we shall never see.” And as they sang “The Internationale,” their desperate faces shone, though their voices were hoarse from weakness. Reed was also amazed at the way in which, in the midst of civil war, in a winter in which Moscow went for weeks without

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light and men and women froze in their apartments, the founda­ tions were being laid for the new social order. New medical centers were being built all over Russia, even in villages that had not had a doctor before. A great educational campaign had been begun to secure better sanitation. Free maternity hospitals had been established, free dispensaries, free centers of child-care. Schools were springing up everywhere, and the educational sys­ tem was being remade. He talked with Lunacharsky. The thin, delicate, nervous Commissar for Education told him not only of what was being done in the schools but also of the way in which literature and art were being created for the enjoyment of the people. Reed went to the Prolet-cult center in Moscow, where, in cold studios, painters were at work. “Sculpture, paintings, and engravings, very interesting,” he wrote in his notebook. “Character all their own—proletarian.” He talked with Demyan. Byedny, a great smiling man in a yellow sweater, a poet who had a million readers, and with Pasternak, who condemned artists too lazy to master their craft. No one tried to tell Reed that there had been a renaissance in the arts, but he recognized the vigor of a new spirit. Often Reed went to visit Lenin in his apartment in the Krem­ lin, and Lenin was glad to see him, not merely because he was interested in conditions in the United States but also because he liked the gay alertness of the young American. He commended Reed’s decision to live in a working-class quarter, telling him it was the best way to learn Russian and to know Russia. He lec­ tured him about his carelessness with regard to his health, show­ ing a knowledge of physiology that amazed Reed. They talked on all sorts of topics, sometimes until dawn, and Reed felt the humanity as well as the greatness of the man. It was at Lenin’s suggestion that he prepared for the official organ of the Communist International a long article on the rev­ olutionary situation in America. The first part described the A.F. of L.’s support of the war, the capitulation of many lead­ ing Socialists, the persecution of the I.W.W., the rise of patrioteering societies, unemployment at the end of the war, and the passing of laws to legalize the terrorization of the working class.

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It ended, “Capitalism in America has entered the period of de­ cay, and what will come in its place depends on the power of the workers. If the workers are not prepared to resist, the cap­ italists will set up a military dictatorship and reduce the prole­ tariat to slavery.” The second part, which analyzed the growing militancy of American labor, showed how carefully Reed had followed the strikes of the past two years. He described in intel­ ligent detail the general strikes in Seattle and Winnipeg and the Boston police strike, discussed the Plumb plan, told what he had been able to learn about the steel strike, and commented on the policies of the A.F. of L. and the I.W.W. The concluding sec­ tion of the article described the decline of the Socialist Party, which Reed dated from the resolution against direct action in 1912, the rise of the left wing, and, with familiar acrimonious­ ness, the split between the Communist Party and the Commu­ nist Labor Party. Subsequently he wrote an article on the I.W.W., an article that combined his old admiration for its spirit and his new ob­ jections to its policies. After paying tribute to Joe Hill, Frank Little, and the other I.W.W. martyrs of the class struggle, he told the history of the organization and described the break with the Socialist Party. The leaders, he said, had proven themselves poor organizers but magnificent propagandists. The weaknesses of the I.W.W. he attributed, of course, to its anarcho-syndical­ ist principles, and he outlined and refuted the objections of its theorists to the Marxian doctrine of the dictatorship of the prole­ tariat. But he had not forgotten Paterson and the Chicago trial. “If we could reach these‘»men,” he ended, “and make clear to them in their own language the position of the Communists, their innate common sense would show them we are right. And we must do that, for the I.W.W. is the vanguard of the American proletariat, which must lead the assault against capitalism in America.” The writing of these articles was one of Reed’s duties as a representative of the Communist Labor Party to the Interna­ tional and as a spokesman in Soviet Russia for the American rev­ olutionary movement. To all of these duties he conscientiously devoted himself, but he was still a reporter and historian. He

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wanted to know exactly what was happening. In the dead of winter, the worst period of the year, the hardest winter Soviet Russia had known, he went out into the country to see the provincial towns and peasant villages. He went as far as the Volga, talking with every one: with pretty girls; with special­ ists who complained over their tea about inefficiency; with a jocular jailer, who said he could see no sense in eating vegetables when there were nice fat dogs running around; with a peasant girl, who lamented that she could bring no dowry to her hus­ band; with peasants who blessed the Bolsheviks and peasants who cursed them; with a horse-faced Englishman, who told him in detail why Communism couldn’t work. In Klin he attended a meeting of the district soviet and went to the workers’ theatre. In Sverdlov he watched a trial. Often he drove from village to village, talking with the peasants as the sleigh moved along the rutted roads across the great white plain. He took down statis­ tics, furnished by the bourgeois specialists, on the production of wheat and potatoes, made notes on food rations, and recorded the number of schools. At last he came to the Volga. “Impressive for miles,” he wrote in his notebook. “Low abrupt banks. Wide meadows backed by dark forests, as if setting stage for river. Snow-covered ice of river. Fishing holes. Tracks across. The peasant sleighs. Far vil­ lages.” In one of these villages a woman in a beautiful dress of peasant linen gave him and his companions dinner. When they thanked her, she bowed and said, “May it give you health.” He talked with her about religion, and she told him that, though most of the older peasants still went to church, the younger peo­ ple did not. Her husband praised the Communists, but he did not belong to the party, for, he explained, he had a wife and three children, and he could not make the sacrifices member­ ship demanded. In a neighboring village a peasant complained because he had had a horse confiscated. “This is a poor village,” he said. “I do not own my own house. But I did own two horses, and they called me bourgeois, and took one away.” Another peasant objected to the sovkhoz because the men employed there worked only eight hours a day and had more food than

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he. He had a son in the Red Army, but knew nothing of either Denikin or Kolchak. Reed returned to Moscow, more impressed than ever by the vastness of the change the revolution was making in Russian life. Wherever there were factories, he had found the workers enthu­ siastic about the Soviet government, but the peasants were be­ wildered. The poorest peasants were, even in such a winter, better off than they had been before the October revolution, but they found it hard to adjust themselves to the new regime. Yet the new schools and the new medical centers were having their effect on old ideas, and Reed could see how swiftly the intro­ duction of advanced methods of production might alter rural life. But it would be, he knew, a long and agonizing struggle. In Moscow he found that the executive committee of the Communist International had worked out a program for the merging of the two American parties, to which the representa­ tive of the Slavic federations had agreed. A committee of six, three representing each party, was to call a convention, to which delegates were to be sent on the basis of membership in local units. The central committee elected by this convention would have control of the united party, including the federations. Both parties had, in the meantime, been outlawed. On Decem­ ber 21, 1919, 249 foreign-born radicals, whose cases had been rushed through the Department of Labor without pretense of legal procedure, were deported on the Buford. On January 2, A. Mitchell Palmer’s agents conducted simultaneous raids on Communist, Communist Labor, and Socialist meeting-places throughout the country, arresting more than ten thousand per­ sons. Thirty-eight members of the Communist Labor Party, including Reed, and eighty-five members of the Communist Party were, three weeks later, indicted in Chicago. A man, who turned out to be a respectable owner of liberty bonds, was arrested in Beacon, New York, as John Reed, and Illinois offi­ cers hastened east with extradition papers. It was, then, with the almost complete certainty of being sent to prison, that Reed planned to return to the United States. He was already under indictment in Chicago, and, as a matter of fact, most of the men who were indicted with him were, the

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following August, sentenced to from one to five years. In New York, moreover, his former colleagues on the Revolutionary Age were being brought to trial for having circulated the left­ wing manifesto, of which he had been one of the authors. Never­ theless, when he went to greet Emma Goldman, who had arrived on the Buford, he was as buoyant as ever, full of enthu­ siasm for the revolution, and somewhat irritatingly contemptu­ ous of her doubts. He told her a little of what he had seen, of the heroism and of the great achievements in the midst of civil war, and was grateful for what she could tell him of the movement in the United States and. for the messages she brought from Louise Bryant. Promising to greet her friends in America for her, and to see her again in Moscow before very long, he rushed out of her room as impetuously as he had entered. Twice John Reed tried to make his way through the lines of Soviet Russia’s enemies, and twice he failed. The first attempt was made through Latvia. On his way to the Red Army, he had to change at a junction. For a day and a night he waited in a dilapidated station, five miles from the nearest village. The win­ dows in the waiting-room were broken, and the floor was coated with ice, for the water-pipes had burst. On the floor and on tables and benches, soldiers were lying, tossing and muttering in the delirium of typhus. Outside, on the station platform, peasants piled the bodies of three hundred soldiers who had grown tired on the march, fallen into the snow, and frozen. And yet, in another room of the station, soldiers, themselves like half-frozen skeletons, were cheering a Communist speaker. The train he was expecting did not come, and soldiers warned him that it never would. The Red Army, they said, was retreat­ ing, and he could not possibly get through. At last an empty military train arrived, bound east, and Reed crawled into a box car, with two soldiers, a railroad worker, and a peasant woman. They built a fire, and, until the bottom of the car burned out, managed to keep comfortable. It was an inglorious return, and, as soon as another plan could be devised, Reed made his second attempt. This time, hidden in the bunker of a Finnish ship bound for Sweden, he got as far

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as Abo, but there he was discovered. The Finnish authorities had, of course, no doubt as to his mission, but, to avoid inter­ national complications, they held him on the technical charge of smuggling, since he was carrying with him some funds as well as letters and propaganda. He was placed in solitary con­ finement in the police station in Abo. It was early in March when he was arrested, and for the first month he was unable to communicate in any way with his friends in America. His letters to American diplomatic officials were undelivered or, if delivered, were not answered. A Finnish liberal, Madame Aino Malmberg, secured a lawyer for him, but she was no more successful than he in reaching the consul. She did manage to send word of Reed’s arrest to an American re­ porter, and the New York papers of March 17 carried a brief story, but the State Department announced that it had received no information and had no reason to believe he had been seized. Day after day Reed sat alone in his cell reading, or walked aimlessly about. Finally a stratagem occurred to him, and he sug­ gested to Madame Malmberg that she should announce his death. On April 10 the papers in the United States carried a report that John Reed had been executed in Finland. The State Depart­ ment was forced to investigate, and on April 15 it announced that it had definite information that he was alive. A few days later it gave out a statement that it would not interfere inasmuch as Reed had been arrested according to Finnish law. The Finnish government, it was reported, had discovered on his person sums of money and jewels worth 880,000 Finnish marks, as well as moving picture films, phqtographs, and pamphlets. He carried a seaman’s identification card made out to James Gormley and forged passports and letters made out to Samuel Arnold, Jr. Louise Bryant, who had doubted the stories of Reed’s arrest, now began frantically to act on his behalf. Bainbridge Colby, Secretary of State, informed her that the department would, on her request, cable the legation at Helsingfors to assist Reed in getting a lawyer. She would have to pay all expenses, and the department would not guarantee reliability of counsel. After advancing funds to pay for cables, she hastened to get in touch with Reed’s friends. There were many persons who, whatever

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their opinion of his politics, were unwilling to have him exe­ cuted in Finland: Whigham and Hovey of the Metropolitan, Bourke Cockran, Senator McNary, Jane Addams, George Kirchwey, Fred Howe, Louis Post, Arthur Garfield Hays. Even Reed’s uncle, General Burr, wrote a letter to the State Depart­ ment. By the end of April, the Finnish authorities decided to permit Reed to communicate with America, and on April 29, he wired Louise Bryant, “Nothing yet decided. Have everything neces­ sary. Are you all right?” Four days later he wrote her a letter: Central Police Station Abo, Finland May 3, 1920. Dearest HoneyLast week a cable arrived from you, wanting to know about my case. So I know at least that you have heard of my arrest. This is what worried me very much—the idea that perhaps you knew noth­ ing about me, and wondered where I was. I thought perhaps it would be as it was in 1918. For me it has been worse than that. I have heard absolutely not a word from you since I left home— except news of you from Emma and the other exiles, which proved that at any rate you were alive. I have been so fearfully worried— about your health, about whether you had anything to do, enough to eat, etc.—whether you were well or ill. You will never have an idea of what it has been to me—especially since I have been in here (now in the eighth week of solitary imprisonment). Now about my case. I have sent you one letter, addressed to Croton, and two cables. At present I am in jail, waiting for some­ thing to happen. Up to now no charge has been laid against me, except that of smuggling. This case has been tried, the diamonds all confiscated, and I have been fined five thousand marks (about $250$300). I have appealed. But this is not what keeps me in prison. It is the question of whether I have committed treason towards the Finnish state. It appears that there are “diplomatic negotiations” going on between the Finnish government and the United States government. Why, I do not know. Now, honey, I want you please not to influence the American government to help me. I mean this very seriously. I wish this case to be decided entirely on its merits. I am in good health—surprisingly good health—and almost all the time cheerful enough. But the thought of you drags at me some­

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times until my imagination plays tricks, and I almost go crazy. Please, please write me about everything. Don’t send me any money—I have plenty. And don't worry— there’s not the slightest danger. Please let mother know of my situa­ tion. You might send her one of these letters. I hate to ask you—but will you try to save my watch. That is all. I hope it won’t be long before we see each other again. Spring is coming and I long for Croton. Your loving Jack.

Ten aays later he wrote her again, this time addressing the envelope to a friend.

Central Police Station Abo, Finland May 13. For Louise Bryant

Dearest Honey—

Your dear letter of April 23rd arrived today. Evidently you have not yet received my two letters. I am not yet free, as you see, but on the other hand I am also not accused of anything. I am informed that the American government has demanded that I be surrendered to the American authorities, why I cannot understand. But I do not think the Finnish authorities can do this without accusing me, try­ ing me, and finding me guilty. However, it is impossible to say what a bourgeois government cannot do. I am sending you some money today. It seems terrible that you should have to meet all those burdens, and I have worried myself sick over your health. w I heard that you were planning to come here. If it is for the sake of helping me, I beg you not to do so. But if it is because you want to come abroad, and possibly to be with me in case I am delayed—and, of course, if you can find the money—do it by all means. But wait for a cable before you actually sail. I am very well. Have given up smoking for the last two months here, and am allowed a little walk in the yard every day. The police master here has really been most friendly and generous to me. As for the American authorities, they have of course not been near me, or sent any word all the time I have been here. But I am thankful for that. I do not want any help from the authorities as regards myself.

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I think I understand thoroughly the situation at home, and will know what to do. I am all right, dearest, and except for the nervousness of doing nothing and being alone week after week, and worry about my honey, I am able to stand it indefinitely. All my love, and greetings to all. Tell Horace [Liveright] the big chief [Lenin] thinks my book the best. Many compliments for yours. Jack. By the fifteenth, Reed had had two more letters from Louise. He was surprised, he told her, that so many persons had become interested in his case, and he could scarcely believe her assertion that the Department of State was trying to secure his release. “I am informed by the Finns,” he wrote, “that I am kept in prison at the request of the United States government.” No representa­ tive of the government had ever been to see him, and only once had there been an inquiry, directed to his lawyer, about the progress of the case. “If I fail in all other ways to get a decision from the Finnish authorities, I shall probably try a hunger strike.” The threat of a hunger strike was effective, and four days later he was able to write Louise that he was to be released. “The Finns,” he explained, “are asking the American minister, Ma­ gruder, to give me a passport. If he does—which is practically impossible—I shall start for Stockholm immediately, and from there, after learning the situation at home, I shall act accordingly. If he does not give me a passport, the Finnish government will give me notice to leave the country in twenty-four or forty­ eight hours. The idea is, of course, if I then go to Sweden, I will be hustled to America without any opportunity to look around —more or less deported, in fact. So I have demanded, if I am to be told to leave the country, to go to Esthonia; I am asking a permit from the Esthonian government.” Whatever assurances Bainbridge Colby might give Louise Bryant, the government was apparently treating Reed as an enemy. William Hard, though he knew Reed but slightly, was one of the persons who acted in his behalf. After finding the Wilsonian liberals consistently evasive, he went to Bernard

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Baruch. Baruch, who was about to leave Washington for New York, asked him who Reed was. On being assured that he was a dangerous radical but indubitably an American citizen, he went to the State Department, though it meant missing his train, and demanded action. He was'told that the department would im­ mediately request the Finnish government to see that Reed was protected. Whether actually anything was done in Washington, even then, on Reed’s behalf cannot be determined, but it seems likely that the State Department continued to work against him. On May 25, he learned that the Finnish authorities had given Amer­ ican agents access to his papers. Certain now that his passport would be refused, he withdrew the request he had made to Ma­ gruder, and asked Madame Malmberg to arrange for his return to Russia by way of either Reval or Bieloostrov. He also author­ ized her to act as his agent in the attempt to recover his papers from the government. Among the papers he listed letters from American exiles and Russians to friends in America, a preface in Lenin’s handwriting to Ten Days That Shook the World, vari­ ous photographs, a number of pamphlets, and the false passports. As the days went on, and there was no sign of action, it be­ came more and more difficult for Reed to remain patient. During the early weeks of his confinement, he had done much reading, but the amount of paper given him was so restricted that he could do no extensive writing. He did begin, on scraps of paper, a romantic prose-poem, called “The Ever-Victorious,” and he made outlines for two novels. Again and again he had made notes for novels, but they had never been written. Now, in a Finnish prison, he amused himself by making another start. One of the novels was to be a story of New York politics, of a reformer, a boss, and a Socialist. It was not to be autobiographical, although the central character, a reporter who became disillusioned with reform and associated himself with the boss, was to be given many of Reed’s experiences. The revolutionary movement was to be used as a foil to both the reformers and the boss. The other novel was almost purely autobiography. Although the hero, Robin, was to be born in the Middle West and edu­ cated in a small college, his parents were obviously modeled after

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Reed’s: the father identifies himself with his son and lives in his life; the mother is described as “loving, narrow, maternal.” After Robin is brought to New York, the outline becomes little more than a catalog of Reed’s experiences. “Meets Steff. Gets job on magazine. Phillips, Siddall, Boyden, Nock. Dutch Treat. Harry Kemp comes with poem.... Brevoort. Hippolyte Havel. Hen­ rietta Rodman. Mary Vorse ... 42 Washington Sq. Seeger. Bobby Rogers. Red Lewis. Bobby Jones. Seeger lost in curious English poets. . . . Wash. Sq. Players. Prov. Players. . . . The coming of Gene O’Neill. . . . Robin in love with the doctor’s wife—her salon. She rich, old. He poor. Conflict. He tries to leave. Wretchedness. Break . . . Death of Osgood. Death of Adams ... Leo Stein’s talk.... Long poem (mine) on the city. ... Nev Republic ... Harold Steams. Randolph Bourne. Wal­ ter Lippmann . . . Gift-shops, guides, and village riff-raff. A scene in Frank Shay’s book-shop. . . . Free-speech fight. Tan­ nenbaum and unemployed—churches. . . . Haywood, Gurley. ... Collapse of the I.W.W. Joining Socialists. Branch meetings, street speaking, Jim Larkin. Bayonne, the break with his paper. Free lancing, poverty, marriage. The war. Conscientious objec­ tor but registers. Not called. Russian revolution and the new So­ cialism. . . . Tortures, deportations, raids, soldier-mobs, fearful sentences. The raid on People’s House. The Communist Party. . . . Peace and Bolshevism.” All this was exciting to look back on, in that dismal little cell, where Reed never undressed at night, where—despite his assur­ ances to Louise Bryant—the food was meager and bad, where he waited and hope rose and fell. He also wrote one poem, which he called “A Letter to Louise”:

Rainy-rush of bird-song Apple blossom smoke Thin bells’ water-falling sound Wind-rust on the silver pond Furry staring willow-wand Wan new grasses waking round Blue bird in the oak— Woven in my word-song.

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White and slim my lover Birch-tree in the shade Mountain pools her fearless eyes Innocent, all-answering. Were I blinded to the spring Happy thrill would in me rise Smiling half-afraid At the nearness of her. All my weak endeavor Lay I at her feet Like a moth from oversea Let my longing lightly rest On her flower-petal breast Till the red dawn set me free To be with my sweet Ever and forever.

But, as week after week passed by, and as freedom came close and drew away, impatience grew and any kind of concentration became impossible. After the good news of the middle of May, he heard nothing. There were, however, forces working for his liberation that he did not know about. The Soviet leaders, once they learned of Reed’s imprisonment, began negotiations with the Finnish government, not relying on diplomatic letters, but proposing what amounted to an exchange of prisoners. The So­ viets held two Finnish professors arrested for counter-revolution­ ary activities, and these they offered to exchange for Reed. (Lenin was reported as saying that he would gladly turn over a whole college faculty if he could get Reed released.) And ap­ parently this proposal was more effective than whatever steps the State Department took, if, indeed, the United States govern­ ment was not working for Reed’s detention. He wrote Louise: May 30. Dear HoneyWhy did your letters stop all of a sudden? I only got two. But probably you thought I would soon be out. However, here I still

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sit, going on the twelfth week of imprisonment. But the end is in sight. The Finnish government has already notified me that I shall not be tried, but turned loose. I asked the American minister here for a passport home. He did not reply—as he has refused to answer all communications from me. But he told a Finnish government official that he would on no circumstances give me a passport. Therefore, rather than be brutally deported, I have asked permis­ sion from the Esthonian government to allow me to go through Reval to Russia. Or at least Madame Malmberg has done it for me. I am given to understand that it will be done—the permission will be granted me; but for some strange reason no answer comes, although it is now ten days since I requested permission. And still I sit here, in the bright June weather, spending most of my time worrying about my honey and longing for her. I shall return for the present to Russia. If you can come abroad, do so. Get ready, but don’t start until later word from me! I shall send you much more definite instructions as soon as I leave here. I have kept very well in prison, exercising, not smoking. (I quit three months ago.) Have been to the dentist and had all my teeth fixed. Have read many serious books, but almost crazy because I cannot write. Don’t forget the interest on Croton due August i, and on Truro Sept. 26. Don’t forget my watch. Monday, May 31. Still no word from Esthonia. Tuesday, June 1. Still no word. It seems to me as if I shall never get out. The worst is to keep on expecting release day after day. My mind is getting dull. Honey, the house ought to be rented. Wednesday, June 2. Still not a whisper. It is dreadful to wait so, day after day—and after three months too. I have nothing to read, nothing to do. I can only sleep about five hours, and so am awake, penned in a little cage, for nineteen hours a day. This is my thirteenth week. 8 P.M.—Just this minute word came! I am to go to Reval on Saturday’s boat from Helsingfors—or maybe I must wait until Tues­ day. Anyway, Vm going! This is the last letter to my honey from this place. Wait for news from me, dearest. Your loving Jack. On the seventh he telegraphed from Reval: “Passport home refused. Temporarily returning headquarters. Come if possible.”

XXI

By the Kremlin Wall

r Esthonia fields were unplowed and factory chimneys smokeless. In Soviet Russia green crops were growing, and the factories were all at work. The people of Petrograd were not only better dressed and better fed than they had been when Reed left, three months before; they were stronger, happier, more confident. Bands played every afternoon in the parks, and thousands of people walked up and down or sat in little cafés drinking tea and coffee. The streets were clean, and the Nevsky— newly christened the October 25 th Prospect—was being re­ paved. At John MacLean Quay, formerly the English Quay, or at Jean Jaurès Quay, formerly the French Quay, it was possible to take small river-boats up the Neva to Smolny. And on the islands at the mouth of the Neva, where the millionaires and nobles had their summer villas, thousands of Petrograd workers were taking their vacations. Reed went on to Moscow, where the public gardens blazed with flowers. The Kremlin walls had been repaired, and Mos­ cow University, allowed to grow shabby since 1912, was being painted white. The theatres were open and crowded, and Reed heard Chaliapin in Faust. While he was in jail the civil war had begun again, with Pilsudsky and the Poles attacking in the Ukraine, and Wrangel and the last of the White Guard moving north from the Crimea; but the Red Army was winning vic­ tories on both fronts, and every one was optimistic. Reed was not well. His arms and legs were swollen; his body was covered with sores, the result of malnutrition; and his gums had been attacked by scurvy. While Emma Goldman helped to 387

r

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JOHN REED

take care of him, they argued together about the dictatorship of the proletariat. He was distressed by his two failures to reach the United States, but delighted with the change that had taken place in Russia. To her bitter criticisms, he replied with a heated defense of Soviet policy. Her mind had been set, he told her, in old-fashioned anarchist molds, and she could not recognize the revolution when she saw it. In the warm summer days he quickly regained his good spirits, though he could not obliterate the effects of his imprisonment on his constitution. While he was convalescing, he wrote an article for the Liberator, “Just now it is a beautiful moment in Soviet Russia,” he began. “Clear sunny day follows clear sunny day.” After describing the atmosphere of Moscow and Petro­ grad, the sense of well-being and the new spirit of hope, he wrote: “And the children! This is a country for children, pri­ marily. In every city, in every village, the children have their own public dining-rooms, where the food is better, and there is more of it, than for the grown-ups. Only the Red Army is fed so well. The children pay nothing for their food; they are clothed free of charge by the cities; for them are the schools, the children’s colonies—land-owners’ mansions scattered over the face of Russia; for them are the theatres and concerts—the im­ mense, gorgeous state theatres crowded with children from or­ chestra to gallery. In their honor Tsarskoe Syelo—the Tsar’s Village, the village of palaces—has been rechristened Dietskoe Syelo, the Children’s Village; a hundred thousand of them spend the summer there, in relays. The streets are full of happy chil­ dren.” He did not want to give a false impression: “This does not mean that all is well with Soviet Russia, that the people do not hunger, that there is not misery and disease and desperate, end­ less struggle. The winter was horrible beyond imagination. No one will ever know what Russia went through.” And he went on to describe that winter, telling what he had seen in Moscow and Petrograd, on the Lettish front, in Serpukov. After telling about the Red Army and the labor armies, he was going on to describe his trip to the Volga, but he did not have time, and he sent the article as it was, unfinished.

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Once he had recuperated, there was little time for writing, for he was needed to aid in preparations for the second congress of the Communist International. There were innumerable meet­ ings to draw up plans, draft proposals, prepare appeals and proc­ lamations, and Reed, as a member of the executive committee, was present at most of them. By the first of July delegates had begun to arrive. From all over the world they came, most of them traveling illegally, hiding on ships, passing through enemy lines at night, suffering frightful hardships. Some delegates never reached Russia, arrested or, one or two of them, killed. One American member of the I.W.W. crossed the Pacific and walked five hundred miles through the deserts and mountains of Man­ churia to attend the congress. Reed, taking a room in the hotel that was reserved for dele­ gates and guests, began to make the acquaintance of his com­ rades. Learning that there was an American anarchist in a nearby room, he rapped on the door and walked in, calling, “Good morning, neighbor.” The American, Owen W. Penney, looked up, and the first thing he noticed was the eyes, sparkling, smil­ ing, sympathetic. It did not take Reed long to learn Penney’s story. Bom in the Middle West, the son of a miner, Penney had been in Europe all through the war, and had taken part in work­ ing-class struggles in half a dozen countries. Though an anar­ chist, he wanted to see what was happening in Russia, and he smuggled himself across the boundary from Germany. Reed and Penney were friends by the time they went down together to breakfast, and Reed immediately began to point out the errors in anarcho-syndicalism, which he usually called absurdo-stupidism. Through Penney he met Paul Freeman, an Australian syndicalist, and the three of them spent hours to­ gether. In April Lenin had written “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder for the guidance of the congress. There was no English version in print, but Reed secured a translation in manuscript, going over it, sentence by sentence, with Free­ man and Penney. The former was a Communist by the begin­ ning of the congress and the latter by its close. While he prepared for the congress, Reed was sending word to Louise Bryant by whatever means offered themselves. On the

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sixteenth of June he sent her one hundred dollars and gave her minute instructions for the trip to Russia. On the twenty-third he repeated his instructions, adding, “We shall not be separated another winter. It is beautiful here now, and everything is going well. Great events are to be expected; I can say no more now, except that I love you.” And on the twenty-ninth another cou­ rier carried assurances that plans for her voyage and her entrance into Russia were practically completed. On July 19, the congress opened in Petrograd with an address by Zinoviev, paying tribute to the martyrs of the revolution and describing the difference between the Second and Third Inter­ nationals. After his speech had been translated into German, French, and Italian, the presidium was elected. Kalinin greeted the congress in the name of the Russian workers and peasants, and Lenin, after a long ovation, spoke on imperialism, the situa­ tion of the world revolutionary movement, and the aims of the congress. The mood of the congress was optimistic. The Red Army was driving back Pilsudsky’s forces, and the Red Fleet was in the Caspian Sea. The Italian Socialists, the members of the Ger­ man Independent Social Democratic Party, many French Social­ ists, and even members of the British Independent Labor Party favored affiliation with the Third International. The very com­ position of the congress gave hope. “It was remarkable,” Reed wrote, “for the number of real proletarians, of actual workmenfighters-strikers, barricade-defenders, and active leaders of the revolutionary nationalist movements in the backward and colo­ nial countries. German Spartacists, Spanish syndicalists, Amer­ ican I.W.W.’s, Hungarian Soviet and Red Army leaders, British shop stewards and representatives of Clyde workers’ committees, Dutch transport workers, Hindu, Korean, Chinese, and Persian insurrectionists, Irish Sinn Feiners and Communists, Argentin­ ian dockers, Australian wobblies. All these people were not clear on Communism; they had violently divergent ideas about the dictatorship of the proletariat, parhamentarism, the need for a political party; but they were welcomed as brothers in revolu­ tion, as the best fighters of the working class, as comrades that were willing to die for the overthrow of capitalism.”

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On the first day of the congress there was a great demonstra­ tion in Petrograd. “Tremendous masses,” Reed wrote, “flowed like a clashing sea through the broad streets, almost overwhelm­ ing with their enthusiastic affection the delegates as they marched from the Tauride Palace to the Field of Martyrs of the Revolution.” On the steps of the old stock exchange, which had become a club for sailors, five thousand actors presented a pageant of the revolution from the Paris Commune to the world­ wide triumph of the proletariat. Reed, watching it with the most intense excitement felt that one of his greatest dreams had come true. Here was the revolutionary art for which he had longed, since the Paterson pageant, seven years before, had given him his first glimpse of the possibilities of mass dramatic expression. “Why not write an article about it?” asked Fraina, who was sit­ ting beside him. “An article!” Reed answered. “I’d like to write a book!” He might have written a book, tracing the winding road from Paterson to Petrograd, a book that would have summed up all that he felt about art and all that he felt about labor. It was all there, in the pageant before him, miraculously unified and terribly alive. When the congress, after the preliminary session, moved to Moscow, crowds at every station greeted the special trains that carried the delegates. In Moscow itself three hundred thousand people—soldiers, workers, children, athletes—marched in honor of the congress. There was a great banquet at which Chaliapin sang and other artists performed. Delegates were housed, fed, given free access to theatres, and everywhere greeted with re­ spect and affection. Soviet* Russia, torn though it was by civil war, gave its best to the soldiers of world revolution. When the congress reconvened in Moscow, on July 23, Reed, as soon as the order of business had been announced, rose and, in the name of twenty-nine comrades, proposed the placing of the question of the trade unions nearer the head of the list. “This is a serious problem,” he said. “We must thoroughly discuss the trade union question and have time to consider everything re­ lated thereto.” He also moved that, at least for the duration of discussion on this topic, English be made one of the official lan­ guages of the congress. Both motions were defeated.

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While Zinoviev opened the discussion of the role of the Com­ munist Party in the revolution, Reed looked about the great Andreyev Throne Room of the Imperial Palace in the Kremlin. It was an extraordinary gathering, and one that he was proud to belong to. He was enough of a poet to appreciate the color and romance and to feel the drama in the lives of these oppressed, police-hunted men and women who dared to plan the winning of a world. But it did not seem strange to him that he was here, for he had come by a path that, viewed in retrospect, seemed perfectly straight, and he felt himself at one with these workers of the nations. The next day the composition of the various commissions was announced. There were to be five, and both the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party were represented on each. Reed was appointed to both the commission on national minorities and the colonial question and the commission on trade union activities. Zinoviev served on the former, and Lenin, Kam­ enev, and Radek on the latter. During the next few days Reed was occupied with these two commissions, speaking frequently in their meetings. On the twenty-sixth the congress as a whole took up the ques­ tion of nationalist and colonial revolutionary movements. Reed, arriving late from the trade union commission, sent a note to Lenin, asking if he was to speak. Lenin replied, “Absolutely.” From carefully prepared notes, he described the situation of the Negro in the United States, speaking of discrimination in every aspect of life. “As an oppressed and downtrodden people,” he said, “the Negro offers to us a twofold opportunity: first, a strong race- and social movement; second, a strong proletarian labor movement.... In both the northern and southern parts of the country the one aim must be to unite the Negro and the white laborer in common labor unions; this is the best and the quickest way to destroy race prejudice and develop class solidar­ ity.” Soon every one at the congress knew John Reed as he walked, coatless and tieless and usually smiling, to his seat in the Krem­ lin. Many noticed and admired his broad shoulders, but some could see that his flesh was flabby and that he was not well. AI-

BY THE KREMLIN WALL

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though he spent as much time as he could in the sun, his face remained sallow, and there were new lines on his forehead and near the corners of his mouth. The forehead, underneath his dis­ orderly hair, seemed broader now that his face had lost its goodnatured pudginess. His moüth, when he was not grinning, was ordinarily rather gentle, but it could take a hard, straight line that his Greenwich Village friends would not have recognized. The eyes, though the touch of green in their brown was as con­ fusing as ever, and though the light was as sharp and the eager­ ness as unmistakable, were startled and a little hurt. He did not look healthy, and yet he was indefatigable. After spending all day at the congress, he was ready to devote half the night to talk. And the next morning he would be making vocif­ erous speeches at the meeting of the commission on the trade union question. This question he wanted to discuss day and night, in the congress and out. He became the spokesman in the commission for those who opposed the policy of working within the existing unions. The form of the unions in America and England, he argued, was such that they could not be used for revolutionary purposes even if the Communists did capture all the offices. He admitted that it was foolish to leave the unions so long as the masses were in them, but Communists should try, not to capture but to smash them, so that industrial unions could be built in their place. Europeans, who were familiar with a different kind of labor or­ ganization, failed, he insisted, to understand that in England and America unions were highly developed and developed in such a way as to restrain their members from revolutionary activity. The theses prepared by the commission on the trade union question came to a vote on August 4, and there were very sharp and fundamental differences of opinion expressed by the dele­ gates. Radek eloquently defended the resolutions of the ma­ jority, which the C.P. supported. Reed as eloquently attacked them. He contended that Communists could no more use the re­ actionary trade unions than they could the bourgeois state. The revolutionary crisis was advancing so swiftly that militant workers in the A.F. of L. were already looking for more effec­ tive organizations, and the masses of unorganized workers could

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not be brought into the reactionary unions. By entering the A.F. of L., Communists, instead of building their strength among the masses, would be isolating themselves. After Zinoviev had sug­ gested that Reed was too optimistic, the theses proposed by Radek were adopted. At the last business session, on August 6, Zinoviev announced the new executive committee, of which Reed was a member. The final meeting of the congress was held in the Moscow Opera House the next day. The delegates, members of the All-Russia Soviet Executive Committee, and leaders of the Moscow Soviet sat on the platform, and the great hall was filled with workers. After representatives of several countries had spoken, Zinoviev made the final speech, and Kalinin put the motion for adjourn­ ment. When the thousands of men and women had sung “The Internationale,” and the applause was ceasing, the Italian dele­ gates burst into one of their own revolutionary songs, and soon the entire throng was once more singing and shouting. John Reed, as excited as he had ever been when he danced before the cheering section at a Harvard-Yale game, saw the chance, in these moments of wild enthusiasm, to carry out a cherished plan. Signaling to Paul Freeman, who was as tall as he, and to Owen Penney, he marched towards the smiling Lenin. Freeman grasped one leg and Reed the other, and Penney boosted. Before he knew what was happening, Lenin found him­ self high on Reed’s and Freeman’s shoulders, gazing down on a bewildered crowd. Ignorant of American customs, or perhaps disapproving, he protested, and, when protests did no good, kicked. They let him down, Reed, unabashed, joking at the bump on Penney’s forehead. For three weeks after the end of the congress Reed was occu­ pied with meetings of the executive committee. The various ap­ plications for affiliation were carefully scrutinized, and the sit­ uation of the revolutionary forces in each country examined. The United Communist Party and the Communist Party were instructed to unite within the next two months—though actually it was almost a year before unification was achieved. In the sessions of the E.C.C.I. Reed had an opportunity once

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more to debate the theses on trade unionism. “After a long and bitter fight,” he reported to his comrades at home, “the execu­ tive committee made several amendments to their theses, which, although far from satisfactory to the objecting delegates, still made it possible for Communists in America to work for revolu­ tionary industrial unionism and for the destruction of the reac­ tionary American Federation of Labor.” The revised theses did recognize that dual unionism might in some circumstances be necessary, and they recommended the supporting of such revo­ lutionary unions as already existed, but they required Commu­ nists to join the regular trade unions and not to leave them unless they were forced to do so. Reed predicted that the next congress would adopt a different policy. The whole concept of revolutionary industrial unionism had, of course, been implanted in Reed’s mind at the time of his introduction to the class struggle in Paterson, and his observa­ tions of the A.F. of L. had convinced him that the I.W.W. was right. And now he was so deeply immersed in the struggle, so thoroughly pre-occupied with revolutionary tactics, that it seemed to him of supreme importance that the right approach to the trade unions should be adopted. So intense was his feeling that he was constantly involved, in the commission, in the con­ gress, and in the meetings of the executive committee, in passion­ ate debate. Zinoviev and Radek were the leaders of the other camp, and against Zinoviev in particular Reed developed some animosity. During one of the sessions of the executive commit­ tee, Reed peremptorily offered his resignation from the E.C.C.I. in protest against Zinoviev’s decision on an organizational ques­ tion. It was not, of course, a thing that a disciplined revolu­ tionary would have done, and Reed was persuaded by his fellow-delegates to withdraw his resignation and offer his apologies to the committee. At the end of August, a call came for members of the execu­ tive committee to go to the Congress of Oriental Nations at Baku. “An Appeal to the Enslaved Masses in Persia, Armenia, and Turkey” had been issued by the executive committee of the International in July. Describing the exploitation of the peasants and workmen of Persia, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Armenia, Syria,

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and Arabia, the appeal challenged them to throw off the im­ perialist yoke. “Do not spare any effort,” it concluded, “and let as many of you as possible come to Baku on September i. For­ merly you used to make pilgrimages across the desert to the Holy City; now cross mountains, rivers, and deserts to meet one an­ other. ... Let the congress show your foes in Europe, America, and in your own country that the time for slavery is over, that you have risen, and that you will conquer.” Reed was one of those assigned to go. On the twenty-sixth, just as he was making ready to leave, word came that Louise Bryant had reached Stockholm some time before and was on her way into Russia. He tried to make some arrangement for her to be sent after him to Baku, but the authorities refused to let a woman go through the zone of civil war. He left a note for her, explaining his absence, and naming persons in Petrograd and Moscow for her to see. “I am longing to see you,” he wrote, “more than I can tell. It seems years. I am worrying about only one thing. I must soon go home, and it is awfully difficult to get out of here, especially for a woman. That is why I tried to get word to you to wait for me outside. But as soon as I found out that you were coming, I was glad that I was to see my honey sooner.” Baku, which the Soviets had lost in 1918, had been recaptured in the spring of 1920. On the Caspian Sea, across the Caucasus Mountains, it represented the farthest thrust of Soviet power into the Near East, the scene of the bitterest imperial struggle. To reach it, the delegates had to pass through the southern Ukraine, where the Red Army was battling with Wrangel’s troops. They rode in an armored train, through the fertile Volga plains that Reed had seen deep with snow a few months before. From the window he could watch the peasants at their work, and then, as they came near the Caspian, there were glimpses of troops, and one or two guerrilla bands made futile raids against the train. And at last there was Baku, center of the richest oil deposits in the world, coveted by every power in Europe, an oriental city, an old Tartar city, being transformed by the world’s newest great industry. Two thousand men of the East, Turks, Persians, Armenians,

BY THE KREMLIN WALL

397

representatives of the Asiatic nationalities of Soviet Russia, even a few Hindus and Chinese, came to the congress, wearing their strange and colorful costumes. It was a dramatic, romantic scene, the kind of scene that John Reed loved. He was a member of the presidium and a speaker. Boyish in his open-necked white shirt, he stood before these bright-robed Orientals to tell them about American imperialism. “I represent,” he began, “the revolutionary workers of one of the greatest imperialist powers—the United States of America. You have not yet tasted American domination. You know and hate English, French, and Italian imperialists, but you probably think that ‘free America’ will rule better, will liberate the co­ lonial peoples, will feed and protect them. But the workers and peasants of the Philippines, the peoples of Central America and of the islands in the Caribbean Sea—they know the meaning of the domination of ‘free America.’ ” After describing the conquest of the Philippines and explain­ ing that formal emancipation would still leave American capital­ ists in control, after showing what had happened in Cuba, Haiti, and Santo Domingo, after telling what he had himself seen in Mexico, after depicting the sufferings of ten million Negroes, he asked the people of the Near East why they should expect better treatment from the United States. To the Armenians he pointed out that Cleveland Dodge, who administered Armenian relief, exploited the workers in his copper mines and, when they went on strike, drove them into the desert as ruthlessly as any Turk could have done. He spoke of the way relief had been used in Hungary to destroy the Sqviets, and charged that American aid to the sufferers of the Near East would also be given only for the sake of advancing American interests. “No, comrades,” he said, “Uncle Sam never gives anything free of charge. He comes with a sack of hay in one hand and a whip in the other, and whoever believes his promises will pay in blood. . . . Don’t trust American capitalists. There is but one road to freedom. Unite with the Russian workers and peasants, who overthrew their capitalists and whose Red Army conquers the troops of the foreign imperialists. Follow the red star of the Communist International!”

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Radek, Zinoviev, and Bela Kun were the principal speakers. “The real revolution,” Zinoviev said, “will blaze up only when the eight hundred million people in Asia unite with us, when the African continent unites, when we see that hundreds of millions of people are in the movement. We, must kindle a holy war against the British and French capitalists. We must create a Red Army in the East, to organize uprisings in the rear of the British, to destroy every impudent British officer who lords it over Tur­ key, Persia, India, China.” As the men of the East sprang to their feet, flourishing swords, spears, and revolvers, Reed, sitting at the front with the others of the presidium, could scarcely believe that this was not one of the dreams of oriental glamor with which The Arabian Nights had filled his boyhood. With his gift for making himself understood by men whose language he did not know, Reed moved among the delegates and pieced together their romantic stories. He saw, of course, the practical difficulties of linking nationalist struggles with the pro­ letarian revolution, but he knew that many of these two thou­ sand delegates would go home to work patiently and heroically for the emancipation of the working class. He wished he could follow them, into the Orient that all his life he had wanted to know. The congress ended, and the representatives of the Interna­ tional started back in their armored car to Moscow. As the train passed through the territory in which the fight against Wrangel was going on, it was attacked by bandits. The Red Army squad on the train repulsed the guerrillas and started in pursuit. Reed, begging for permission to go with them, was allowed to ride on the peasant wagon on which they mounted their machine guns. Up into the hills they went, laughing, good-natured boys like those in La Tropa. They were loath to return to the waiting train, and so was he. He found Louise Bryant in Moscow. She had had to make the last stage of her trip disguised as a sailor, but she had come. To her he seemed older and sadder and strangely intense. She felt that he was tired and ill. But he was eager for her to see the new Russia, and they visited Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Enver Pasha, and Bela Kun, saw the ballet and Prince Igor, went to the art

BY THE KREMLIN WALL

399

galleries. There was still much for him to do, of course, meetings of the executive committee, special conferences, a report of the congress of the Comintern to write for the United Communist Party. At one time he dropped in at the Department of Foreign Affairs, where Nuorteva and Wilfred Humphries were working in the Anglo-American office. They asked him about Baku, and for two hours he talked to them, telling, with enthusiasm and drama, the story of the congress. “You should have seen the swords flash!” he said. With Louise he talked about America, about the novel and the poetry he intended to write. He hoped that the active tasks of revolution could be left in other hands, that he might write, of and for the revolution of course, but write. But first there would be the final unification of the Communists to accomplish, and there was his indictment in Chicago. This he was determined to face, though Louise insisted that conviction was certain. When she urged him to stay in Russia and rest, he told her that that would be cowardly. There was a touching letter from his mother that Louise had brought. He had written her from the Abo jail, the first letter he had been able to send to her in many months. “What you say about feeling selfish,” she had replied, “makes me feel badly, dear. Don’t ever feel like that. You are doing what you think is right—that is all any of us can do in this world—and if we don’t do it, we’re all wrong. Except for fear for your personal safety, the rest is all right in my eyes if you feel that it is.” It was a happy fortnight, despite Louise’s alarm over Reed’s health and her fear of the consequences if he returned to the United States. He was perfectly confident, very eager, very busy. On the morning of September 22, he went to Kamenev’s office to see him, and found Clare Sheridan there, preparing to make a bust of the revolutionist. They spoke together briefly, and that night she wrote in her diary: “We were delayed in starting by John Reed, the American Communist, who came to see him on some business; a well-built, good-looking young man, who has given up everything at home to throw his heart and life into the work here. I understand the Russian spirit, but what strange force impels an apparently normal young man from the

4oo

JOHN REED

United States? I am told by the Russians that his book, Ten Days That Shook the World, is the best book on the revolution, and that it has become a national classic and is taught in the schools.” Three or four days later, Reed felt ill. He had always scorned to take any precautions against disease, laughing at Americans with their bug-powder and their fetish of sterilization. After all, he had been exposed to typhus in Serbian hospitals, on Russian trains, in barracks and in jails. Even now his illness, which the doctor diagnosed as influenza, did not seem serious. For a week Louise Bryant cared for him, and then, as he seemed to grow worse, asked for a consultation. The doctors, deciding that he had typhus, ordered his removal to the Marinsky Hospital. Although he was in pain, his interest in the movement was undiminished. Louis Fraina brought him the stenographic record of his speeches in the congress. Having been translated from English into German and then from German into Russian, and finally translated back again into English, the speeches were fan­ tastically garbled. Reed was distressed at the distortion of his ideas, and, unable to make the revisions himself, asked Fraina to put the text in shape. Until he actually lost consciousness, he was clear-headed, interested in what was going on, brave. As it became apparent that his condition was serious, all the resources of the hospital were concentrated on the attempt to save his life: four doctors, two consulting physicians, an assistant surgeon, and an English-speaking nurse were in attendance. Santeri Nuorteva ransacked the city for the proper medicines, but they were hard to get. Indeed, as Robert Hallowell was to write, “His end might have been different if our State Department had not refused to allow medical supplies to go to Russia.” Into the great city, so busy with the tasks of revolution, too busy to think much of one more case of typhus, word went forth on the seventeenth of October that John Reed was dying. Wilfred Humphries and Santeri Nuorteva, hearing the report, hurried to the hospital. They came into the little room, and the doctor turned to them, saying that he was dead. The body was taken to the Labor Temple, where for seven days it lay in state, guarded by soldiers of the Red Army. Louise

BY THE KREMLIN WALL

401

Bryant wrote to Mrs. Reed, telling of the illness and death. “He died on Sunday,” she wrote, “but will not be buried until next Sunday, the twenty-fourth. He will be buried in the most hon­ ored spot in Russia, beside all the great heroes in the Kremlin. You know how honored he is here. ... I feel very far away, but the Russians have been very kind to me. They have spared no effort to make things easier for me. And they loved Jack greatly, and they gave him every honor in their power.. . . We spoke often of home and of you and we thought how we could see you when we came back. We talked of long vacations when Jack could finish his history. He had a novel all planned out and many short stories...” In America the revolutionary movement prepared its tributes. Even the kept press that he hated praised John Reed now that he was dead. Friends stopped each other on the street and talked about him. To the students of English 12, Copey, cursing the Bolsheviki, praised the courage and loyalty of his Jack Reed. There were many who talked about wasted talent, and some whose pat phrases concealed relief. But in Atlanta and Leaven­ worth, in Sing Sing and Cook County Jail, in hundreds of pris­ ons, and in the hiding-places of an outlawed Communist move­ ment, men shut their jaws tight. During the week news came that Wrangel was retreating: the civil war was nearly over. The twenty-fourth was a gray day, with rain that was sometimes sleet and sometimes snow. The leaders of the Communist International and the Moscow Soviet and the handful of Americans in the city gathered in the Labor Temple. On the walls wete flaming cartoons of the revolution. The coffin was covered with wreaths of artificial flowers—the tin wreaths Reed had found so hideous when he had watched, almost three years before, the burial of the revolutionary mar­ tyrs of Moscow. It was the best the struggling proletariat could do. Through the streets of Moscow the procession moved to the Red Square, as Reed had marched to the funeral of the heroic workers and soldiers. Thousands of workers walked behind the coffin, and a band played, over and over, the funeral march of the revolution. At the grave by the wall of the Kremlin the great

402

JOHN REED

throng stood in the rain and sleet, while Bukharin, Kollontai, Radek, Reinstein, Murphy, and Rosmer spoke. To the Americans the speeches seemed hard and impersonal—except for the warmth of Alexandra Kollontai’s tribute. For Bukharin and Radek and the others the death of John Reed was only an incident in the struggle for world revolution. He would have approved.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Without the assistance of Louise Bryant, who placed at my dis­ posal not only all of John Reed’s papers but also her own notes regarding his life, this biography would have been almost impos­ sible. The number of references to the Louise Bryant Collection in Appendix A is some measure of my indebtedness to her. I am scarcely less indebted to John Stuart, who abandoned his own plan to write a biography of Reed, turned over to me all the material he had gathered, and for nearly a year devoted himself to research for this book. The book owes more than I can say to his faithful examination of newspaper and magazine files and to his resourceful investigation of all sorts of clues. It owes much, too, to his suggestions for the treatment of the material, and, though I have done the actual writing of the book, so that he is not to be held responsible for its faults, I am conscious of the extent to which his judgments have influenced and enriched the presentation. To the individual members of the Harvard Alumni John Reed Committee and to the committee as a whole I am grateful for many kinds of assistance. It was this committee that made it possible for John Stuart to go to Paris, organize the material that Louise Bryant had so kindly offered to put at my disposal, and bring it back to this country. Its secretary-treasurer, Corliss Lamont, originally sug­ gested my writing the book, and he has repeatedly helped and encouraged me. * A biography such as this, even though one individual retains responsibility, becomes a collective effort. Despite the considerable amount of documentary material available, the book would have been a bare outline if persons who knew John Reed had not come to my aid. More than one hundred and fifty of them did help me, and I gratefully list their names: Jane Addams, G. W. H. Allen, Sherwood Anderson, William F. Avery, Roger Baldwin, George Gordon Battle, Bessie Beatty, Maurice Becker, George Biddle, Carl Binger, Frank Bohn, F. S. Boyd, Heywood Broun, Roger Burlingame, John G. Burr, Arthur P. Butler, David Carb, Kate Carew, Stuart Chase, Maximilian Cohen, Saxe Commins, Charles Townsend Copeland, William H. Daly, 403

404

JOHN REED

Frank Damrosch, H. W. L. Dana, Francis W. Davis, Floyd Dell, Robert Dunn, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Ellner, Charles W. Ervin, Joseph Ettor, John Evans, F. D. Everett, George Falconer, Alice Withrow Field, Sara Bard Field, M. Eleanor Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Martha Foley, Louis C. Fraina, Waldo Frank, Lewis Gannett, Arturo Giovannitti, H. J. Glintenkamp, Alan Gregg, Thomas N. Gregory, Alex Gumberg. Robert Hallowell, Harry Hansen, Hutchins Hapgood, William Hard, Arthur Garfield Hays, Hugh H. Herdman, Paula Holladay, Frank M. Houck, R. S. Howard, Wilfred Humphries, Edward E. Hunt, Gustave A. Hunziker, Fannie Hurst, Agnes Inglis, Will Irwin, Ellis O. Jones, H. V. Kaltenborn, Francis F. Kane, John Kelley, Nicholas Kelley,. John Kennard, Edna Kenton, Charles Kuntz, Alfred B. Kuttner, William S. Ladd, Sinclair Lewis, Sally Lewis, Paul Lieder, Edward Lindgren, Walter Lippmann, William Bross Lloyd, Herman Lorber. Eadmonn MacAlpine, Percy MacKaye, Don Marquis, George H. Marsh, Edward S. Martin, George W. Martin, Lewis A. McArthur, Isaac McBride, Samuel Duff McCoy, Spencer Miller, Robert Minor, Richard Montgomery, Edward J. Morgan, Benjamin W. Morris, Charlotte Morton, Robert A. Morton, Scott Nearing, William Allan Neilson, Walter M. Nelson, Albert Jay Nock, Charles D. Osborne, Eric Parson, Jeannette D. Pearl, Waldo Peirce, Owen W. Penney, Marlen E. Pew, J. S. Phillips, W. T. Pickering, Amos Pinchot, Ernest Poole, Grace Potter, Lucien Price, Patrick Quinlan, Charles Recht, Boardman Robinson, Robert E. Rogers, Mrs. C. O. Rose. Wheeler Sammons, Isidor Schneider, Howard Scott, Frank Shay, Lee Simonson, Herman Simpson, Harrison Smith, MacCormac Snow, Sigmund Spaeth, Louis Stark, Thomas Steep, Lincoln Stef­ fens, George Stephenson, Alice Strong, Genevieve Taggard, Ida Tarbell, Graham Taylor, G. H. Tilghman, Berkeley G. Toby, Marie Tomsett, Carlo Tresca, John Kenneth Turner, Louis Untermeyer, Richard Van Buskirk, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mrs. David Wallerstein, Carl Walters, Helen Walters, Hathaway Watson, John Hall Wheelock, Albert Rhys Williams, Gluyas Williams, Bertram Wolfe, Berwick B. Wood, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, Francis C. Woodman, Hella Wuolojoki, Philip Wyman, Art Young, H. A. Osgood, Ruth Osgood. Some of these persons gave more information than others, but all of them gave generously, and I thank them all. The reader may observe the absence from the list of certain names that appear fre­ quently in the text. There were a few men and women who, though they were closely associated with Reed, refused, for reasons that seemed adequate to them, to help me. I mention the fact merely

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

405

because it should be made clear that I did not intentionally neglect any possible source of information. To some of the men and women I have listed I have a double debt, for they read portions of the manuscript: Frank Damrosch, Robert Dunn, Louis C. Fraina, Robert Hallowell, Edward E. Hunt, Samuel Duff McCoy, Boardman Robinson, Lincoln Steffens, Alice Strong, and Albert Rhys Williams. My obligations to Robert Hallowell extend still further, for he 5ave me permission to reproduce his portrait of John Reed, painted or the Harvard Alumni John Reed Committee and now hung in Adams House at Harvard. His friendship, moreover, has been not only a personal satisfaction but an influence upon the book. Special gratitude is also due Harrison Smith, who, in spite of his interest in another project for a biography of Reed, contributed his personal recollections and helped me to secure material that I needed. I wish to thank Samuel Chamiak, H. W. L. Dana, and Sergei Dinamov for gathering material in the Soviet Union, Lee Levenson for her faithful work in copying and recopying the manuscript, Nelson and Tillie Frank for scrutinizing the manuscript for errors of fact, and Robert G. Davis for his critical reading of the text. If I have accidentally omittèd any one from this list whose name belongs upon it, I offer apologies as well as thanks. There are those, very close to me, whose names I have consciously omitted, as they preferred; they know the magnitude of my debt and the warmth of my appreciation.

G. H.

Grafton, New York January 1, 1936

NOTES

423

1920), and on Statutes, Theses, Etc. of the Communist International (Chicago, 1923). Reed’s speech on the Negro question is given in full in The Second Congress of the Communist International, pp. 151-4, and was commented upon in the New York Tribune for Nov. 27, 1920. Information regarding Reed’s part in the congress was given me by Louis C. Fraina* Eadmonn MacAlpine, Owen W. Pen­ ney, and a delegate to the congress who does not wish to have his name revealed. Translations of relevant portions of the official stenographic re­ port of the Congress of Oriental Nations have been furnished me by friends. The incident of the return trip was described by Michael Gold in his column in the Daily Worker for Oct. 14, 1935. Louise Bryant describes the last month of Reed’s life in her article, “Last Days with John Reed” (Liberator, Feb., 1921) and in her letter to Mrs. Reed, a copy of which was lent me by E. E. Hunt. The quo­ tation from Clare Sheridan’s diary is taken from her Mayfair to Moscow (1921), in which there is also a description of Reed’s fu­ neral. Emma Goldman describes the funeral in the works cited above, and Alexander Berkman in The Bolshevik Myth (1925). I am indebted for other information to Louis C. Fraina and Wilfred Humphries. The official medical report was printed in the New York Call for Nov. 3, 1920. Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Marguerite Harrison (in Marooned in Moscow, 1921) and M. Schwartz (in an interview printed in the New York Tribune for Jan. 12, 1921) all mention the fact that Reed received the best medi­ cal attention that was possible under existing circumstances.

APPENDIX B Bibliography I.

WORKS BY JOHN REED

i.

Books

and

Pamphlets

Diana's Debut. Lyrics by J. S. Reed, music by Walter S. Langshaw. Cam­ bridge: privately printed. 1910. Sangar. Riverside, Conn.: Frederick C. Bursch. 1913. The Day in Bohemia, or Life Among the Artists. Riverside, Conn.: privately printed. 1913. Everymagazine, An Immorality Play. Words by Jack Reed, music by Bill Daly. New York: privately printed. 1913. Insurgent Mexico. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1914. The War in Eastern Europe. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1916. Abridged edition, ibid., 1919. Tamburlaine. Riverside, Conn.: Frederick C. Bursch. 1917. The Sisson Documents. New York: Liberator Publishing Company. 1918. Ten Days That Shook the World. New York: Boni and Liveright. 1919. New York: International Publishers. 1926. New York: Modem Library. 1935. Daughter of the Revolution, edited by Floyd Dell. New York: Vanguard Press. 1927. 2. Plays * “Moondown,” Masses, Sept., 1913. “Freedom,” in The Provincetown Plays, Second Series (New York, 1916) and A Treasury of Plays for Men, edited by Frank Shay (Boston, 1923). “The Peace That Passeth Understanding,” Liberator, Mar., 1919. 3.

Poems

(Those marked with an asterisk are reprinted in Tamburlaine.) “In Memoriam (Anson Hard Boulton).” Morristonian, Mar., 1905. “The Storm at Midnight,” Morristonian, Apr., 1905. “The Violin,” Morristonian, June, 1905. “Twilight,” Morristonian, Dec., 1905. “Thermopylae,” Morristonian, Dec., 1905. 415

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JOHN REED

“Sonnet to a Daisy (Apologies to Milton),” Morristonian, Jan., 1906. “Diodotus’ Speech in Defense of the People of Mytilene,” Morristonian, Feb., 1906. “Morning,” Morristonian, Mar., 1906. “To Thee,” Morristonian, Mar., 1906. “A Dedication,” Morristonian, June, 1906. “Lines to Tennyson,” Morristonian, June, 1906. “Lost,” Morristonian, June, 1906. “Guinevere,” Harvard Monthly, July, 1907. * “October,” Pacific Monthly, Oct., 1907. “Tschaikowsky,” Harvard Monthly, Oct., 1907. (Reprinted in Selected Poems from the Harvard Monthly, 1885-1910, Cambridge, 1910.) “Pan,” Morristonian, Jan., 1908. “The Tempest,” Harvard Monthly, Jan., 1908. “California,” Harvard Monthly, Feb., 1908. • “The Desert,” Harvard Monthly, Apr., 1908. “Night,” Pacific Monthly, May, 1908. “The West,” Harvard Advocate, June 15,1908. “The Dancing Woman,” Harvard Monthly, Oct., 1908. • “Coyote Song,” Harvard Monthly, Oct., 1908. “The Sea-Gull,” Harvard Advocate, Oct., 16, 1908. “A Winter Run,” Harvard Illustrated Magazine, Jan., 1909. “The Sword Dance,” Harvard Monthly, Feb., 1909. “Dear Heart,” Harvard Monthly, Mar., 1909. “And Yet—,” Harvard Monthly, Mar., 1909. •“Forgotten” (Adapted from the French of Heredia), Harvard Monthly, May, 1909. Also American Magazine, Dec., 1911. “Flowers of Fire” (Adapted from the French of Heredia), Harvard Monthly, May, 1909. “De Profundo,” Harvard Monthly, Oct., 1909. “Melisande,” Harvard Monthly, Nov., 1909. “Score” (Words for song by J. W. Adams). Sheet music, Cambridge, 1909. “Wanderlust,” Harvard Monthly, May, 1910. “Willamette,” Pacific Monthly, July, 1910. • “The Wanderer to His Heart’s Desire,” American Magazine, Aug., 1911. • “The Foundations of a Sky-Scraper,” American Magazine, Oct., 1911. “Revolt,” International, Jan., 1912. * “The Slave” (Adapted from the French of Heredia), American Magazine, Feb., 1912. “The Tenement Clothes Line,” New York Mail, Apr. 24, 1912. (Reprinted in The Day in Bohemia.) • “June in the City,” American Magazine, June, 1912. • “This Magazine of Ours,” American Magazine, July, 1912. • “The Wedding Ring,” American Magazine, Aug., 1912. • “Sangar,” Poetry, Dec., 1912. (Published in booklet form by F. C. Bursch, Riverside, Conn., 1913. Reprinted in Monroe and Henderson, The New Poetry.) • “Tamburlaine,” American Magazine, Jan., 1913.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

427

“A Hymn to Manhattan," American Magazine, Feb., 1913. (Reprinted in The Day in Bohemia.) • “Deep-Water Song,” Century, Mar., 1913. * “April,” American Magazine, Apr., 1913. • “A Song for May,” American Magazine, May, 1913. • “A Farmer’s Woman,” Masses, Joly, 1913. (Reprinted in May Days, edited by Genevieve Taggard.) “Noon,” Collier's, July 26, 1913. “The Great Adventure,” New York Press, Oct. 26, 1913. • “Winter Night,” American Magazine, Jan., 1914. • “Love At Sea,” Masses, May, 1916. • “To Max Eastman,” Hillacre Broadside, 1916 (?). “Hospital Notes,” Poetry, Aug., 1917. “Proud New York,” Poetry, Apr., 1919. (Reprinted in Poetry, Jan., 1921, and in Monroe and Henderson, The New Poetry.) “Fog,” Scribner’s, Aug., 1919. (Reprinted in the Liberator, Dec., 1920, and in May Days, edited by Genevieve Taggard.) “America, 1918,” New Masses, Oct. 15,1935. •

4. Short Stories and Sketches

(Those marked with an asterisk are reprinted in Daughter of the Revolution.) “A Typical Yankee Tale,” Morristonian, Nov., 1904. “The Transformation,” Morristonian, Jan., 1905. “Atlantis,” Morristonian, May, 1905. “The End of the World,” Morristonian, Dec., 1905. “The Tragedy of a Mild-Mannered Man,” Morristonian, Jan., 1906. “The Conspiracy,” Morristonian, June, 1906. “Bacchanal,” Harvard Monthly, June, 1907. “The Red Hand,” Harvard Monthly, Apr., 1908. “Infinities,” Pacific Monthly, Oct., 1908. “From Clatsop to Nekamey,” Harvard Monthly, Dec., 1908. “The Pharaoh,” Harvard Monthly, Jan., 1909. “The Singing Gates,” Harvard Monthly, Feb., 1909. “The Winged Stone,” Harvard Monthly, Apr., 1909. “In England’s Need,” Harvard Monthly, Jan. and Feb., 1910. “East is East and West is West,” Harvard Monthly, Oct., 1910. “The Swimmers,” Forum, Aug., 1911. “Overboard” (in collaboration with Julian Street), Saturday Evening Post, Oct. 28, 1911. “The Man from the Seine,” Century, June, 1912. “Monsieur Vidoq Steps Up,” Century, Sept., 1912. “The Dinner Guests of Big Tim,” American Magazine, Dec., 1912. • “Where the Heart Is,” Masses, Jan., 1913. • “A Taste of Justice,” Masses, Apr., 1913. “The Peripatetic Prince,” Smart Set, June, 1913. (Reprinted in The Smart Set Anthology.) • “Another Case of Ingratitude,” Masses, July, 1913. “Showing Mrs. Van,” Smart Set, Dec., 1913.

4î8

JOHN REED

“Seeing is Believing,” Masses, Dec., 1913. “Mac-American,” Masses, Apr., 1914. “The Englishman. A War Correspondent’s Wondering Observation,” Metro­ politan, Oct., 1914. “The Cook and the Captain Bold,” Metropolitan, Nov., 1914. • “Daughter of the Revolution,” Masses, Feb., 1915. “The Barber of Lille,” Metropolitan, July, 1915. ♦ “The Rights of Small Nations,” New Republic, Nov. 27, 1915. • “The World WeU Lost,” Masses, Feb., 1916. • “The Capitalist,” Masses, Apr., 1916. * “Broadway Night,” Masses, May, 1916. • “The Head of the Family,” Metropolitan, May, 1916. “Dynamite,” Collier’s, Aug. 26, Sept. 2, 9, 16, 1916. “The Last Clinch,” Metropolitan, Nov., 1916. • “Endymion, or On the Bordfer,” Masses, Dec., 1916. “The Buccaneer’s Grandson,” Metropolitan, Jan., 1917. “A Friend at Court,” Masses, May, 1917.

* • •

5. Articles (Those marked with an asterisk are reprinted in Insurgent Mexico; those marked with two asterisks are reprinted in The War in Eastern Europe.) “Immigrants,” Collier’s, May 20, 1911. “The Involuntary Ethics of Big Business, A Fable for Pessimists,” Trend, June, 1911. “A Reminiscence,” American Magazine, Nov., 1911. “Charles Townsend Copeland,” American Magazine, Nov., 1911. “Frederick Muir,” American Magazine, Apr., 1912. “Joseph E. Ralph,” American Magazine, Oct., 1912. “War in Paterson,” Masses, June, 1913. “From Omaha to Broadway,” Metropolitan, July, 1913. “Sheriff Radcliffs Hotel,” Metropolitan, Sept^ 1913. “With Villa in Mexico,” Metropolitan, Feb., 1914. “The Causes Behind Mexico’s Revolution,” New York Times, Apr. 27, 1914. (Reprinted as a pamphlet, June, 1914, by The American Association for International Conciliation, with an introduction by Professor John Bates Clark.) • “With La Tropa,” Metropolitan, Apr., 1914. • “The Battle of La Cadena,” Metropolitan, May, 1914. • “Francisco Villa—The Man of Destiny,” Metropolitan, June, 1914. “What About Mexico?” Masses, June, 1914. “If We Enter Mexico,” Metropolitan, June, 1914. • “With Villa on the March,” Metropolitan, July, 1914. “The Colorado War,” Metropolitan, July, 1914. • “Happy Valley,” Masses, July, 1914. • “The Battle,” Metropolitan, Aug., 1914. * “Jiminez and Beyond,” Masses, Aug., 1914. “The Traders’ War,” Masses, Sept. 1914. (Unsigned.) • “Carranza—An Impression,” Metropolitan, Sept., 1914.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

429

• “El Cosmopolite” Metropolitan, Sept., 1914. “The Approach to War,” Metropolitan, Nov., 1914. “Notes on the War,” Masses, Nov., 1914. (Unsigned.) “With the Allies,” Metropolitan, Dec., 1914. “German France,” Metropolitan, Mar., 1915. “The Worst Thing in Europe,” Masses, Mar., 1915. “In the German Trenches,” Metropolitan, Apr., 1915. “Back of Billy Sunday,” Metropolitan, May, 1915. * • “Serbia Between Battles,” Metropolitan, Aug., 1915. * * “At the Serbian Front,” Metropolitan, Oct., 1915. • • “Breaking Into Bucovina,” Metropolitan, Nov., 1915. * • “The Burning Balkans,” Metropolitan, Dec., 1915. “The Jew on the Eastern Front,” in The Book of Exile, New York, 1916. • * “Constantinople The Great,” Metropolitan, Jan., 1916. * * “Behind the Russian Retreat,” Metropolitan, Mar., 1916. * • “Pinched in Poland,” Metropolitan, May, 1916. “Bryan on Tour,” Collier’s, May 20, 1916. “The Mexican Tangle,” Masses, June, 1916. “Persecution of Mexican Refugees,” Masses, June, 1916. * * “Holy Russia,” Metropolitan, July, 1916. “At the Throat of the Republic,” Masses, July, 1916. “Roosevelt Sold Them Out,” Masses, Aug., 1916. “The National Circus,” Metropolitan, Sept., 1916. “Industry’s Miracle Maker,” Metropolitan, Oct., 1916. “Why They Hate Ford,” Masses, Oct., 1916. “An Heroic Pacifist,” Masses, Nov., 1916. Introduction to Crimes of Charity, by Konrad Bercovici, New York, 1917. “Industrial Frightfulness in Bayonne,” Metropolitan, Jan., 1917. “Whose War?” Masses, Apr., 1917. “Russia,” Masses, May, 1917. “The Myth of American Fatness,” Masses, July, 1917. “Militarism at Play,” Masses, Aug., 1917. “This Unpopular War,” Seven Arts, Aug., 1917. “One Solid Month of Liberty,” Masses, Sept., 1917. “News from France,” Masses, Oct., 1917. (With Louise Bryant.) “A Letter from John Reed,” Masses, Nov.-Dec., 1917. “Red Russia—The Triumph of the Bolsheviki,” Liberator, Mar., 1918. “Red Russia-Kerensky,” Liberator, Apr., 1918. “Red Russia—A Visit to the Russian Army,” Liberator, Apr. and May, 1918. “A Message to Liberator Readers,” Liberator, June, 1918. “Foreign Affairs,” Liberator, June, 1918. “Recognize Russia,” Liberator, July, 1918. “The Case for the Bolsheviki,” Independent, July 13, 1918. “Kerensky is Coming!” Liberator, July, 1918. “John Reed vs. Maxim Gorky,” Upton Sinclair’s, Aug., 1918. “How the Russian Revolution Works,” Liberator, Aug., 1918. “The Social Revolution in Court,” Liberator, Sept., 1918. “With Gene Debs on the Fourth,” Liberator, Sept., 1918. “On Intervention in Russia,” Liberator, Nov., 1918.

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JOHN REED

“The Structure of the Soviet State,” Liberator, Nov., 1918. “The Second Day,” in One Year of Revolution, New York, 1918. “The Origins of Workers’ Control in Russia,” Revolutionary Age, Nov. 23, 1918. “The Constituent Assembly in Russia,” Revolutionary Age, Nov. 30, 1918. “John Reed on the Bolsheviki,” Upton Sinclair's, Dec., 1918. “About the Second Masses Trial,” Liberator, Dec., 1918. “They are Still There!” Revolutionary Age, Dec. 11, 1918. “Bolshevism in America,” Revolutionary Age, Dec. 18, 1918. Introduction to Smoke, by Ivan Turgenev, New York, 1919. “How Soviet Russia Conquered Imperial Germany,” Liberator, Jan. 1919. “A White New Year,” Revolutionary Age, Jan. 4, 1919. “A New Appeal,” Revolutionary Age, Jan. 18, 1919. “The Background of Bolshevism,” Revolutionary Age, Jan. 25, 1919. “Doctor Rakovsky,” Revolutionary Age, Jan. 25, 1919. “Karl Liebknecht’s Words,” Revolutionary Age, Feb. 1, 1919. “Our Own Black Hundred,” Liberator, Feb., 1919. “Great Bolshevik Conspiracy!” Liberator, Feb., 1919. “The Latest from Russia,” Liberator, Feb., 1919. “Liebknecht Dead,” Liberator, Mar., 1919. “Workers’ Control in America,” Revolutionary Age, Mar. 15, 1919. “Prinkipo and After,” Liberator, Apr., 1919. “On Bolshevism, Russian and American,” Revolutionary Age, Apr. 12, 1919. “The Blessings of Militarism,” Liberator, May, 1919. “Bolshevism—What It Is Not,” Liberator, May, 1919. “Why Political Democracy Must Go,” New York Communist, May 8, 15, 24, 31, June 7, 14, 1919. “The I.W.W. and Labor,” New York Communist, May 31, 1919. “The Tide Flows East,” Liberator, June, 1919. “Labor Is Not a Commodity,” Revolutionary Age, July 5, 1919. “Aspects of the Russian Revolution,” Revolutionary Age, July 12,1919. “The Convention of the Dead,” Liberator, Aug., 1919. “Liar or Just Doesn’t Know?” Revolutionary Age, Aug. 9, 1919. “Shop Committees in Russia,” Voice of Labor, Aug. 15, 1919. “Hooray for the Constitution,” Voice of Labor, Sept. 15, 1919. “Communism in America,” Workers* Dreadnought (London), Oct. 4, 1919. “What’s the Trouble with America?” Voice of Labor, Oct. 15, 1919. “Factory Control in Russia,” Voice of Labor, Nov. 1, 1919. “Die Revolutionäre Bewegung in Amerika,” Die Kommunistische Internation­ ale, #8 (Nov.-Dec., 1919), #9 (no date), #10 (no date). “Die Industriearbeiter der Welt,” Die Kommunistische Internationale, *13 (no date). “The Negro Question.” (Speech by John Reed at 2nd Congress of Communist International, printed in Moscow Pravda, Aug. 8, 1920; in The Second Congress of the Communist International, Washington, 1920.) “The World Congress of the Communist International,” Communist, #10 (no date). “Soviet Russia Now,” Liberator, Dec., 1920, Jan., 1921.

APPENDIX A Notes

Since it has seemed unwise to interrupt the pages of this biography with footnotes, I have listed below the principal sources for each chapter, and the careful reader will, I think, have little difficulty in discovering the authority for each statement. The sources are prin­ cipally of three kinds: Reed’s articles, published and unpublished; letters to and from him; and information given me in letters or inter­ views by persons who knew him. The largest volume of material at my disposal was the collection preserved by John Reed’s widow, Louise Bryant, which includes scores of manuscripts, more than a thousand letters to John Reed and more than a hundred from him, the notebooks that he kept in Mexico and Russia and many miscellaneous notes, pamphlets and newspapers that he had collected, scores of clippings related to him, and a variety of personal possessions. It was placed at my disposal through the generosity of Louise Bryant and with the cooperation of the Harvard Alumni John Reed Committee, which is its cus­ todian. In these notes it is referred to as the L.B.C. All published works by John Reed mentioned in the text are listed in the bibliog­ raphy (Appendix B). *

Chapter I

For much of the information in this chapter I am indebted to H. H. Herdman, R. S. Howard, Dr. William S. Ladd, Miss Sally Lewis, Edward S. Martin, Lewis A. McArthur, Mrs. C. O. Rose, MacCormac Snow, Berwick B. Wood, Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood and especially Miss Alice Strong. Miss Strong, Mr. McArthur, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn have helped me with copies of articles in Portland newspapers, and Richard G. Montgomery, in addition to giving me what information he could, appealed to others on my behalf. Reed’s description of Lee Sing’s celebration of his birth is in an 407

4o8

JOHN REED

unpublished manuscript in the L.B.C. Mrs. Alice Withrow Field se­ cured for me information regarding Mrs. Green’s ancestry. Obitu­ aries of Mr. Green appeared in the Portland Oregonian for Apr. 7 and Apr. 12, 1885. It is from that of the later date, written by T. B. Merry, that I have quoted. There is also an account of Mr. Green’s life in H. W. Scott’s History of Portland (Syracuse, N. Y., 1890). Some of the information regarding C. J. Reed is taken from his obitu­ ary in the Portland Oregonian for July 3, 1912. The second section of the chapter is based largely on Reed’s auto­ biographical essay, “Almost Thirty,” in the L.B.C. For comment on the writing of this essay see Chapter XIII. The essay, “The Best Camping Experience,” is in the L.B.C. Chapter II

A. P. Butler and F. C. Woodman, formerly masters of the Morris­ town School, and G. H. Tilghman, the present headmaster, have given information on Reed’s school activities. The Rev. Frank Damrosch, Jr. drew generously on his memories and lent a file of the Morristonian. G. W. H. Allen lent his file of the Rooster. Letters with useful information were received from Major John Kennard, Roger Burlingame, and George Stephenson. Much information has been derived from the Morristonian, and all verse is quoted therefrom. The sentences by Reed are quoted from “Almost Thirty.” The story of the southern boy who influ­ enced Reed was told me by Dr. Alan Gregg. G. H. Marsh gave me the facts concerning C. J. Reed’s appointment as United States Marshal. Chapter III

We have examined the files from 1906 to 1910 of the Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Monthly, the Harvard Advocate, the Lam­ poon, and the Harvard Illustrated Magazine. We have also consulted

the university catalogs of the same period and the class albums. Some information has been drawn from subsequent reports of the class of 1910. This documentary material has been supplemented by letters from or interviews with William F. Avery, Stuart Chase, Charles Town­ send Copeland, Francis W. Davis, Alan Gregg, Robert Hallowell, Edward E. Hunt, H. V. Kaltenborn, John Kelley, Nicholas Kelley, Paul Lieder, Walter Lippmann, Percy MacKaye, George W. Mar­ tin, William Allan Neilson, Eric Parson, W. T. Pickering, Lucien Price, Robert Emmons Rogers, Wheeler Sammons, Lee Simonson,

NOTES

409

MacCormac Snow, Hathaway Watson, John Hall Wheelock, Gluyas Williams, and Philip Wyman. Most of the passages in which Reed comments on Harvard are taken from “Almost Thirty.” I have also drawn on another unpub­ lished essay by him, “The Harvard Renaissance.” Three different versions of this essay are in tfie possession of Edward E. Hunt, who lent them to me. There is a copy of the longest version in the L.B.C. The essay is discussed in Chapter V. Robert Hallowell tells the story of Reed’s proposal to write a book about Harvard in his article in the New Republic (Nov. 17, 1920). The account of the Monthly initiation is from Edward E. Hunt’s “Friendly Faces” in the Monthly for March, 1917. (Hallowell told me about the poem Hunt read.) The description of the club system is from “The Harvard Renaissance.” The bulletin from Concord is in the possession of Edward E. Hunt. Reed told the story of his meeting with William James in “A Reminiscence,” in the American Magazine (Nov., 1911). In the same issue, in the department called “Interesting People,” he has an article on Copeland. The words and music of Diana's Debut were published (Cambridge, 1910). The manuscripts of “Tit for Tat” and “The Last of the Pirates” and the letters from Steffens and Wood are in the L.B.C. The letters from which the adverse comments in the last paragraph are quoted were written in response to the Harvard Alumni John Reed Commit­ tee’s appeal for funds. Chapter IV

The story of Waldo Peirce’s dive has become a legend. The account I have given is based upon a journal Reed wrote on the cattleboat (in the L.B.C.). This substantiates Peirce’s own version of the adventure. Reed based a story on the incident, which he called “The Cattleboat Murder” (ms. in the L.B.C.). This was revised by Julian Street, and the revisioif, entitled “Overboard,” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post for Oct. 28, 1911, as the work of Reed and Street. It is, naturally, the farthest removed from the facts of the three versions, but it is closer to the truth than some of the stories that have been circulated. The account of the Spanish trip is derived from an unpublished article in the L.B.C., “A Dash Into Spain.” Otherwise the chapter is based almost entirely on Reed’s letters to his mother, father, and brother (in the L.B.C.) and to Alan Gregg (lent me by Dr. Gregg). This information has been supplemented by interviews with Waldo Peirce, Gluyas Williams, and H. W. L. Dana, and a letter from Kate Carew.

4io

JOHN REED Chapter V

Steffens describes his relations with Reed in his Autobiography, especially pages 654-6. Reed pays tribute to Steffens in “Almost Thirty.” Reed’s letters to Peirce were lent me by the latter. Other letters quoted in this chapter are in the L.B.C. The description of Reed’s wanderings about New York is based on a passage in “Almost Thirty.” The list of plays is taken from a scrapbook in the L.B.C. “The Harvard Radicalettes” was lent me by Edward E. Hunt. The following persons gave, in interviews or letters, material used in this chapter: Robert Hallowell, Edward E. Hunt, Alfred Kuttner, Walter Lippmann, Percy MacKaye, Samuel Duff McCoy, H. A. Osgood, Ruth Osgood, Robert E. Rogers, Frank Shay, Lincoln Steffens. The published poems, stories, and articles by Reed discussed in this chapter are listed in the bibliography. The unpublished ones are in the L.B.C. Chapter VI

The story of the re-organization of the Masses is drawn from Art Young’s On My Way (1928). Reed’s draft of the statement of pur­ pose is in the L.B.C. According to Max Eastman (“New Masses for Old,” Modern Monthly, June, 1934), he gave Reed’s statement the form in which it was published. Eastman speaks of Reed’s connec­ tion with the magazine in a speech on John Reed reprinted in the Liberator for Dec., 1920. Mabel Dodge’s salon is described in Steffens’ Autobiography and, in a fictional form that constitutes no disguise, in Carl Van Vechten’s Peter Whiffle (1922) and Max Eastman’s Venture (1927). Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Background (1933) and European Experiences (1935) ta^e her story only as far as her return to the United States in 1912. Reed’s arrest in Paterson is described in the New York Times and other papers of April 29, 1913. Reed described his arrest and im­ prisonment in “War in Paterson” (Masses, June, 1913) and condi­ tions in the jail in “Sheriff Radcliff’s Hotel” (Metropolitan, Sept., 1913). The Paterson strike is described in Industrial Relations (64th Con­ gress, ist Session, Senate Document 415, 1916) Vol. Ill, 2411-2634. Bill Haywood's Book (1929) describes both the strike and the pageant, as does Mary Heaton Vorse’s A Footnote to Folly (1935). Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Mary Heaton Vorse, Fred­

NOTES

411

erick Sumner Boyd, Ernest Poole, and Grace Potter gave informa­ tion in interviews and letters. Tresca permitted us to read his un­ published autobiography. Susan Glaspell mentions the pageant in The Road to the Temple (1927). The printed program contains a synopsis of the pageant. John, H. Steiger’s Memoirs of a Silk Striker (Paterson, 1914) discusses the strike and the pageant in terms of complete hostility to the I.W.W. There are brief references to John Reed’s European trip in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Muriel Draper’s Music at Midnight (1929). E. E. Hunt lent me a copy of a news­ paper story about Reed’s speaking to the Italian Socialists. Otherwise the material in the chapter is based upon Reed’s letters to his mother and to Mr. Hunt. Mr. Hunt lent me the letters to him. Other letters quoted in this chapter are in the L.B.C. Chapter VII

Floyd Dell’s Homecoming (1933) and Alfred Kreymborg’s Troubadour (1925) describe Greenwich Village in 1913 and men­ tion Reed. Some of the material in the first section and the opening paragraphs of the second section is based on information given by F. S. Boyd, Waldo Frank, H. J. Glintenkamp, Don Marquis, and Lee Simonson. The interpretation of Reed’s state of mind before going to Mexico owes much to “Almost Thirty.” The remainder of the chapter is entirely based on Reed’s writings, except for a little information about Reed in El Paso and the Torreon campaign given by Thomas Steep. Most, but not all, of the material is included in Insurgent Mexico. The book is not, however, arranged in chronological order. I am giving, therefore, a chronological chart, with dates when they can be determined, and with the sources of information about each episode. The notebook referred to is the one Reed kept in Mexico, which exists, unfortunately incomplete, in the L.B.C. * Presidio and Ojinaga—Insurgent Mexico, “On the Border”; “Endym­ ion” (Masses, Dec., 1916). Chihuahua (Dec. 25-Jan. 1) Metropolitan, Feb., 1914, p. 72. Most of the material on Villa is in Insurgent Mexico, Part II; a little comes from Reed’s article in the World, Mar. 1, 1914. Some of the impressions of Chihuahua and the entire account of the trip to the mines are found in the notebook. “Mac—American” (Masses, Apr., 1914) and the notebook describe New Year’s Eve. Jiminez (Jan. 1) and Magistral—Insurgent Mexico, Part II, and the notebook. Insurgent Mexico conceals what the notebook makes clear, that Reed made the trip with Mac.

412

JOHN REED

Santa Maria del Oro (Jan. 6)—Insurgent Mexico, Part VI, chapters 2’3* Las Nieves (c. Jan. 9) and La Cadena—Insurgent Mexico, Part I, and notebook. Chihuahua (c. Feb. 1) El Paso (Feb. 12 or earlier)—Dispatches to the World, Feb. 13-28; notebook; two unpublished mss. in L.B.C.—the account of the Hearst agent, called “In Short,” and an untitled description of the detectives in El Paso. Mr. Steep remembers the trip into the desert. Chihuahua (c. Feb. 23-28)—World dispatches. Nogales (Mar. 2-4) Insurgent Mexico, Part V, and World dis­ patches, Mar. 4. Chihuahua (c. Mar. 10) Insurgent Mexico, Part VI, chapter 1. Campaign on Torreon (c. Mar. 17-28) Insurgent Mexico, Part IV, notebook, and World dispatches. El Paso (Mar. 30)—World dispatches.

Throughout the chapter I have used many of Reed’s phrases with­ out interrupting the text by quotation marks. Steffens’ views on Mexico are to be found in his Autobiography. Lippmann’s letter to Reed is in the L.B.C. The second quotation is from Lippmann’s article, “Legendary John Reed,” in the New Republic for Dec. 26, 1914. Chapter VIII

Reed’s report of the Union Square meeting appeared in the New York World for Apr. 12, 1914. Pulitzer’s editorial was in the World for Apr. 29. Upton Sinclair describes the Denver newspaper story about Reed in The Brass Check (1920). Jane Addams and Harry Hansen gave information- in letters about Reed’s visit to Hull House. The unpublished interview with Wilson is in the L.B.C., as are the letters from Wilson and Tumulty. The description of the meeting with Bryan is based on the opening paragraphs of Reed’s article, “Bryan on Tour.” (See Chapter XII.) These paragraphs were omitted from the printed article (Collier's, May 20, 1916), but ap­ pear in the version in the L.B.C. Congratulatory letters on the state­ ment in the Times and the Ludlow article and the letters from Hovey and Steffens mentioned in the text are in the L.B.C. Some information comes from interviews with F. S. Boyd and Mary Heaton Vorse.

NOTES

4>3

Chapter IX

The narrative in the first section follows Reed’s Metropolitan articles: “The Englishman” (Oct., 1914); “The Approach to War” (Nov.); and part of “With the Allies” (Dec.). A note appended to “The Traders’ War” (Masses, Sept.) states: “This article is written by a well-known author and war correspondent who is compelled by arrangements with another publication to withhold his name.” Internal evidence indicates that it is Reed’s. The description of the attempt to reach the French front is based on an unpublished manuscript in the L.B.C., “Shot at Sunrise,” and on Robert Dunn’s Five Fronts (1915). Reed’s impressions of London are drawn from another unpublished manuscript in the L.B.C., “Rule, Britannia!” Some material in this section comes from “Notes on the War, by Our European Correspondent” (Masses, Nov.). A comparison of this article with “Rule, Britannia!” and “This Unpop­ ular War” (Seven Arts, Aug., 1917) unquestionably establishes Reed’s authorship. The description of Reed’s visit to Germany follows his articles in the Metropolitan for March and April, 1915. The interview with Liebknecht is described in the Liberator, Mar., 1919, and the Revo­ lutionary Age, Feb. 1, 1919. Dunn’s account of the visit to the Ger­ man lines appears in Five Fronts, Some material in the chapter has been derived from interviews with F. S. Boyd, Robert Dunn, Alfred Kuttner, Ernest Poole, Lee Simonson, Robert Rogers, and Mr. and Mrs. Carl Walters. Chapter X

The first number of the Nev) Republic was dated Nov. 7, 1914. Lippmann’s article on Reed appeared in the issue of Dec. 26. A copy of Enter Dibble was lent me by Edward E. Hunt. There is a description of Roosevelt and Reed in Sonya Levien’s “Col. Roosevelt in Our Office,” Metropolitan Bulletin for May, 1916. This has been supplemented by information from Boardman Robin­ son, William Hard, and Marie Tomsett. The quotations are from Roosevelt’s articles in the March and April (1915) Metropolitan. President Hibben’s letter of protest appeared in the Post for Mar. 2, 1915. In the account of the incident in his book, Five Fronts, Dunn omitted all mention of Reed’s firing. Reed denied in his testi­ mony at the Masses trial and in his testimony at the hearings of the Overman committee that he fired in the direction of the French lines. (See Chapters XVII and XVIII.) Material on Reed’s Boston lecture comes from Boston newspapers of March 4, 5, and 6, 1915, and from Dr. Alan Gregg.

4i4

JOHN REED Chapter XI

The chapter closely follows The War in Eastern Europe, supple­ mented by information from Boardman Robinson. A few details are taken from Reed’s article, “This Unpopular War.” The section on Russia follows a long letter which Reed wrote to Carl Hovey from Petrograd on July 14, 1915 (in the L.B.C.) and an unpublished article (also in the L.B.C.) called “No Americans Need Apply!” All conversations are taken from the latter, in the course of which Reed remarked that, though of course he did not have a stenographic record of what was said, he was willing to vouch for the essential accuracy of his report. The description of the Serbian Socialist is taken from “The World Well Lost” (Masses, Feb'., 1916), and the account of the Standard Oil employee in Bucharest comes from “The Rights of Small Na­ tions” (New Republic, Nov. 27, 1915). A few details concerning the treatment of the Jews are taken from Reed’s article, “The Jew on the Eastern Front” in The Book of the Exile (1916). A few details of his visit to Constantinople are derived from an unpublished frag­ ment in the L.B.C. Chapter XII

The account of Reed’s lecture at the Harvard Club comes from Boardman Robinson, Robert Hallowell, and H. W. L. Dana; the account of the lecture at Sing Sing from Spencer Miller, Jr. Sally Lewis, Sara Bard Field, Mr. and Mrs. Carl Walters, and others gave information on Reed’s meeting with Louise Bryant. The Brooklyn Eagle for Feb. 18, 1916, reported the speech to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society; the New York Telegraph for Mar. 10, 1916, the speech to the Columbia Social Study Club; and the New York Call for Jan. 7, the speech to the Labor Forum. John Kenneth Turner repeated Reed’s comment on Villa in a letter. Alfred Kuttner re­ ported Reed’s reaction to the Schmidt execution. The account of the Willard-Moran fight is contained in an unpublished manuscript in the L.B.C. The article on Bryan appeared in Collier’s for May 20, 1916. A somewhat expanded version of the article, Reed’s notes with Bryan’s revisions, and the correspondence between them are in the L.B.C. “Fog” did not appear in Scribner’s until Aug., 1919, but, accord­ ing to John Hall Wheelock, it was accepted in Oct. 1916. “Pyg­ malion” was bought by the New Republic but not published; it is included in Tamburlaine. Reed’s plans for a workers’ theatre can be gathered from various letters to and from him in the L.B.C. They were described to me in some detail by Miss Grace Potter. The

NOTES

415

quarrel between the artists and Max Eastman has been described by Mr. Eastman in his article, “New Masses for Old” {Modern Monthly, June, 1934). I have supplemented Mr. Eastman’s account with information received from H. J. Glintenkamp. Reed’s conversation with W. A. Neilson is described in a letter Reed wrote Louise Bryant'and in a letter from Mr. Neilson to me. The various letters and telegrams urging Reed to go to Mexico are in the L.B.C. The sources of the material on the Provincetown Players are: The Provincetown Players: A Story of the Theatre, by Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau (New York, 1931); information from F. S. Boyd, Louise Bryant, Saxe Commins, Grace Potter, Rob­ ert Rogers, and Mary Heaton Vorse; articles in the Boston Globe for Aug. 13, 1916, the Boston Journal for Aug. 19, and the Boston Post for Sept. 10; Susan Glaspell’s The Road to the Temple (New York, 1927). The manuscript of “The Eternal Quadrangle” is in the L.B.C., as are the manuscripts of all the unpublished stories men­ tioned in this chapter. Reed’s Bayonne articles appeared in the Trib­ une for Oct. 28, 1916, and the Metropolitan for Jan., 1917. The account of the questions addressed to Hughes appeared in the Springfield Republican for Aug. 2, 1916; the appeal to Socialists in the New York Times of Oct. 28; Reed’s own statement in the Minneapolis News for Oct. 19, and in other papers; a general state­ ment of the group in the Times for Nov. 3. The account of Reed’s hospital experience is based upon his letters to Louise Bryant, a summary of the hospital records supplied by Dr. F. M. Houck, and information from Eric Parson, Carl Binger, and Walter Lippmann. “Hospital Notes” appeared in Poetry for Aug., 1917. “Two Rooms” was unpublished; the manuscript is in the L.B.C. Chapter XIII

Reed’s remarks to Whigham are quoted in Julian Street’s “Soviet Saint” {Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 13, 1930). Art Young describes his experiences with the Metropolitan in On My Way, p. 261. The manuscripts of the articles on Gompers and the Second International are in the L.B.C. Grace Potter and Joseph Ellner furnished informa­ tion about the peace meeting in Washington. Accounts of the hear­ ings appeared in the newspapers of Apr. 13 and 15, 1917; see also Volunteer and Conscription System (Hearings before the House Committee on Military Affairs, Apr. 14, 1917). The letter on con­ scription appeared in the Call of Apr. 19. The unfinished poem is in the L.B.C. Reed described the Hunt’s Point Palace meeting in the Masses for Aug., 1917. The Goldman-Berkman trial is described in Emma Goldman’s Living My Life (1931) and in the newspapers of

4i6

JOHN REED

July 4, 1917. A list of Reed’s articles in the Mail appears in the bib­ liography. Information about the Mail was given by Arthur Gar­ field Hays and Sigmund Spaeth. Waldo Frank gave information on Reed’s relations with the Seven Arts. “Almost Thirty” is in the L.B.C. Chapter XIV

The report on Reed’s examination for military service and a letter regarding his exemption are in the L.B.C. “A Letter from John Reed” (Masses, Nov.-Dec., 1917) describes the delay in Halifax. The voyage is described in two unpublished articles, “Across the War World” and “Scratch a Russian,” in the L.B.C. The description of Stockholm appeared in a letter, sent to Robert Hallowell but in­ tended for publication in the Masses, also in the L.B.C. The dispatch from Stockholm appeared in the Call for Sept. 9, 1917. The trip from Stockholm to Petrograd is described in “Red Russia—I. En­ trance,” an unpublished manuscript in the L.B.C. The letter of Sept. 17 was a personal letter to Boardman Robin­ son. On the same day Reed sent an article, in the form of a letter to Mrs. Robinson. It is from this that the quotation regarding the revo­ lutionary alignment is taken. Both are in the L.B.C. Mr. Francis de­ scribes his surveillance of Reed in his Russia from the American Em­ bassy (1921). The trip to the northern front is described in Reed’s article, “Red Russia—A Visit to the Russian Army,” which appeared in the Liberator in two parts (Apr. and May, 1918). Reed told about the visit to Sestroretzk in “Factory Control in Russia” (Voice of Labor, Nov. 1, 1919). The article sent Robinson appeared in the Call for Dec. 26, 1917. Some incidents in this chapter are drawn from the first three chap­ ters of Ten Days That Shook the World. I have also followed Reed’s notebooks, which are in the L.B.C. There are two fragments of note­ books, containing notes taken in late September and early October, and one complete notebook, covering in detail the trip to the north­ ern front, the interview with Lianozov, the meeting at Obukhovsky Zarod, and a session of the Council of the Republic. There are paral­ lel accounts of some of the events of this chapter in Bessie Beatty’s The Red Heart of Russia (1918), Louise Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia (1918), and Albert Rhys Williams’ Through the Russian Revolution (1921). Chapter XV

The chapter follows Chapters III to IX of Ten Days That Shook the World, often using Reed’s words. These chapters, in turn, fol­

NOTES

417

low Reed’s notebooks, which are in the L.B.C. Some additional in­ formation is taken from his articles in the Liberator: “Red Russia— The Triumph of the Bolsheviki” (March); “Red Russia—Kerensky” (April); “Kerensky is Coming!” (July). The books by Bryant, Beatty, and Williams mentioned above have also been used, together with information from Bessie Beatty, Louise Bryant, Alexander Gumberg, and Albert Rhys Williams. Chapter XVI

The first section draws on Chapters X, XI, and XII of Ten Days That Shook the World and, especially in the description of Moscow,

on the notebooks in the L.B.C. The Bureau of International Revolu­ tionary Propaganda is described by Reed in “Foreign Affairs” {Liberator, June, 1918), “How Soviet Russia Conquered Imperial Germany” (Liberator, Jan., 1919), and “Doctor Rakovsky” (Revo­ lutionary Age, Jan. 25, 1919), and by Bryant and Williams in their books cited above. Williams describes the Cirque Moderne meeting in his “The Spirit of Internationalism,” in One Year of Revolution (1918). “Skeleton Report,” dated Jan. 6, 1918, is in the L.B.C. Reed described the dis­ solution of the Constituent Assembly in “The Constituent Assembly in Russia” (Revolutionary Age, Nov. 30, 1918). Reed’s speech be­ fore the All-Russian Congress of Soviets was quoted in an account of the session in Izvestia for Jan. 24, 1918. This account is translated in a footnote on pages 257-8 of Edgar Sisson’s One Hundred Red Days

The appointment of Reed as consul to New York was announced in the New York papers for Jan. 31, 1918. Dosch-Fleurot’s account of his conversation with Reed appeared in the New York World, Oct. 19, 1920. The Call editorial appeared Jan. 31, and Eastman’s article in the Call Feb. 3, 1918. The cancellation of the appointment is rather obscure. Ambassador Francis testified regarding it in his appearance before the Overman Committee (Brewing and Liquor Interests, III, 965). Sisson’s part is described in his book cited above. Alexander Gumberg states that his action was not suggested by Sis­ son, as Sisson maintains, but was undertaken on his own initiative. Documents regarding Reed’s stay in Christiania and the telegrams sent him by Bryant and Steffens are in the L.B.C. The “Introduc­ tion” dated Mar., 1918, is in the L.B.C. Except for three stanzas, which appeared in Poetry (Apr., 1919), “America, 1918” remained unpublished until it appeared in the New Masses, Oct. 18, 1935. Some of the material in this chapter comes from Louise Bryant, Wilfred Humphries, Charles Kuntz, Robert Minor, Harrison Smith, Graham Taylor, and Albert Rhys Williams.

4i8

JOHN REED Chapter XVII

Reed’s arrest on his arrival in New York was described in the papers of Apr. 29 and 30, 1918. Floyd Dell reported the first Masses trial in the Liberator for June. The accounts of Reed’s New York speeches are taken from the newspapers, chiefly the Call. His speech in Boston was described to me by Robert Rogers, Harry Dana, and Lucien Price. His arrest in Philadelphia is recorded in the records of the trial (see Chapter XVIII), in the newspapers of June 2 and 3, and in the Liberator for July. The account of the Detroit meeting is based on information given by Agnes Inglis and Walter Nelson. The correspondence regarding his attempts to recover his papers is in the L.B.C. Floyd Dell tells of Frank Harris’ proposal in Home­ coming, page 327; Reed’s prospectus is in the L.B.C. Reed’s letter to Steffens is reproduced on page 771 of The Autobiography of Lin­ coln Steffens. Steffens’ reply is in the L.B.C. Art Young describes the trip to Terre Haute and Chicago in On My Way; Reed described his Cleveland experiences in an unpublished letter to the Call, lent me by Charles Ervin; the chief sources of material on Debs and the I.W.W. are, of course, Reed’s two articles in the Sept. Liberator. There is some correspondence regarding his resignation from the Liberator in the L.B.C. The letters from Haywood, Debs, and Wood are in the L.B.C. The Hunt’s Point Palace meeting was reported in the papers of Sept. 14 and 15. Reed’s statement appeared in the Call for Sept. 16. The principal source of material for the description of Reed’s testimony in the second Masses trial is the official transcript of the court stenographer’s record. Reed’s article, “About the Second Masses Trial,” appeared in the Liberator for Dec. Art Young’s On My Way and Floyd Dell’s Homecoming describe the trial. Charles Recht not only permitted me to read his unpublished autobiography and gave me what information he could but also supplied the tran­ script of Reed’s testimony at his own expense. Reed mentions the trial of the Russians in “About the Second Masses Trial,” and there is an article on the subject, very possibly his, in the same issue of the Liberator.

Marlen Pew and Floyd Dell have supplied some of the informa­ tion in this chapter. Chapter XVIII

For some of the material on the Sisson documents I am indebted to Graham Taylor. Reed’s letter to the Public appeared in the issue of Oct. 19, 1918. His letters to 'Upton Sinclair's are in the issues of

NOTES

419

Aug. and Dec., 1918. Accounts of speeches are chiefly taken from the Call. An account of Reed’s speech in Brooklyn on Jan. 10, 1919, ap­ pears in the report of the Overman committee, Vol. II, pp. 27582761. This report (Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda, Report and Hearings of the Subcommittee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Washington, 1919) is the

source of my account of the hearing. The testimony of Kennedy, Tunney, and Stevenson is in Volume II, beginning on page 2661. The testimony of all those who spoke on Russian conditions is in Volume III. Stanley Frost’s article, one of a series on “American Bolsheviki” appeared in the New York Tribune for Mar. 27, 1919. The editorial, “One Man Who Needs the Rope,” appeared in the Jacksonville (Florida) Times-Union for Feb. 24, 1919; a clipping of the editorial was lent me by Edward E. Hunt. Reed’s letter to the Times was published in the Revolutionary Age for Apr. 12, 1919, and in the Call for Apr. 22. The account of the Philadelphia trial is based on information from F. F. Kane, formerly Mr. Wallerstein’s partner, Mrs. David Wallerstein, his widow, and Charlotte Morton, his secretary, and on the records of the trial, made available by Mr. Kane. Accounts of the trial appeared daily in the Call. Some of the material in this chapter comes from interviews with or letters from Sherwood Anderson, Roger Baldwin, Maximilian Cohen, Paula Holliday, Alfred Kuttner, and Herman Lorber. Chapter XIX

The Shaplen debate was reported in the Call for March 7, and a letter from Shaplen appeared in the issue of Mar. 8. Most of the documents involved in the rise of the left wing are to be found in the Lusk report {Revolutionary Radicalism, Albany, 1920). The files of the Revolutionary Age and the New York Communist and Louis C. Fraina’s report to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (reprinted in Red Radicalism, exhibits collected by A. Mitchell Palmer, Washington, 1920) contain much material. Fieldman’s correspondence with Reed and drafts of Reed’s arti­ cles are in the L.B.C., as are Reed’s letters to and from Louise Bryant and his letters from his mother. There is a large collection of reviews of Ten Days That Shook the World in the L.B.C. Wilfred Humphries and Louis Stark gave me information about Reed in Atlantic City. The left-wing conference is described in the Lusk report and in Fraina’s report to the E.C.C.I. Helen and Carl Walters reported to me incidents of the weeks at

420

JOHN REED

Truro. Susan Glaspell describes her conversation with Reed in The Road to the Temple, p. 302.

The three conventions are described in the Lusk report, the Call, James Oneal’s American Communism (1927), The American Labor Year Book, Vol. Ill (1920), Fraina’s report to the E.C.C.I., the Communist Labor Party News for Sept.'and Oct., 1919, Max East­ man’s “The Chicago Conventions” (Liberator, Oct., 1919), William Bross Lloyd’s “Convention Impressions” (Class Struggle, Nov., 1919), and Official Report of the Chicago Convention, by John Reed and Benjamin Gitlow. Information used in this chapter was supplied by Sherwood An­ derson, Roger Baldwin, F. S. Boyd, Maximilian Cohen, Louis Fraina, Wilfred Humphries, Eadn^onn MacAlpine, Scott Nearing, Jeannette Pearl, and Howard Scott. The following chronological chart may assist the reader in follow­ ing my account of the early period of Communism in the United States:

Nov. 7, 1918. Communist Propaganda League formed in Chicago. Nov. 16, 1918. First issue of the Revolutionary Age, published by Local Boston of the Socialist Party. Feb. 8, 1919. Revolutionary Age publishes program and manifesto of the left wing. Feb. 15, 1919. Left wing organizes in New York City. Mar. 2-6, 1919. First Congress of Third International in Moscow. Apr. 19, 1919. First issue of New York Communist. May 21, 1919. “The Socialist Task and Outlook,” by Morris Hill­ quit, appears in New York Call. May 24-30, 1919. National executive committee of Socialist Party meets in Chicago and expels 40,000 members. June 21-24, I9I9* Left-wing conference in New York City. Majority of delegates votes to work within Socialist Party. Minority, rep­ resenting Slavic federations and Michigan Socialists, withdraws. July 5, 1919. New York Communist combines with Revolutionary Age, which becomes national organ of left wing. July 7, 1919. Slavic federations and Michigan Socialists issue call for Communist Party convention. July 19, 1919. National organization committee (minority of left­ wing conference, representing Slavic federations and Michigan Socialists) issues the Communist in Chicago. July 26-27, 1919. New (unofficial) national executive committee, chosen in spring elections (declared illegal by existing national executive committee) meets in Chicago. Aug. 23, 1919. Majority of national council of the left wing (elected at left-wing conference, June 21-24) joins Slavic federations

NOTES

421

and Michigan Socialists in call for Communist Party convention. Opposing minority resigns. Aug. 30, 1919. National Emergency Convention of Socialist Party. Left-wing delegates (including minority of national council of the left wing) expelled and sympathizers withdraw. Aug. 31, 1919. Left-wing delegates and sympathizers meet and pro­ claim their meeting to be true National Emergency Convention. Sept, i, 1919. Convention called by Slavic federations, Michigan Socialists, and majority of national council of left wing forms Communist Party. Sept. 2, 1919. Left-wing delegates and sympathizers form Commu­ nist Labor Party. May, 1920. The Communist Labor Party and a majority of the Communist Party combine to form the United Communist Party. A minority of the Communist Party calls itself the Com­ munist Party. Chapter XX

George N. Falconer, Martha Foley, Don Marquis, Isidor Schnei­ der, and Carlo Tresca have reported to me incidents of the three weeks between Reed’s arrival in New York and his departure for Russia. The letters to Louise Bryant are in the L.B.C. An unfinished article, in the L.B.C., describes Reed’s arrival in Finland. Angelica Balahonova describes Reed in Russia in an article, “John Reed, Poet and Revolutionist,” a translation of which is in the L.B.C. Part of this article was reproduced in the souvenir program of the John Reed memorial meeting, Oct. 17, 1921. An article in the New York World of Aug. 11, 1921, based on information “from a source that is beyond question as to authority,” also dealt with the winter of 1919-20. Most of my material, however, is drawn from Reed’s notebooks in the L.B.C. and from his article, “Soviet Russia Now,” in the Liberator for Dec., *1920, and Jan., 1921. The notebooks contain much more material than the article, especially the account of the trip to the Volga. In Living My Life (pp. 739-41), Emma Goldman speaks of Reed’s coming to see her soon after her arrival in Moscow in January. She reports that he was planning to return by way of Latvia. In the Liberator for Dec., 1920, he describes a trip to the Latvian front. With no more evidence than Miss Goldman’s statement, I have assumed that this trip was part of an unsuccessful attempt to leave Russia. Louise Bryant’s correspondence with the State Department, Reed’s letters to her, and his letters to Madame Malmberg are in the L.B.C. These are the principal sources for this episode. William Hard described for me his conversation with Baruch. Eadmonn Mac-

422

JOHN REED

Alpine reported the story of the exchange of prisoners, which he had heard from Reed in Russia. The account of Reed’s writings while in jail is based on a number of assumptions. One of the fragments of “The Ever-Victorious” is written on the back of a copy of a telegram sent from Abo, and the sheet is stamped with the prison seal. The notes for the two novels were, internal evidence shows, made after the fall of 1919. The chief reason for thinking they were made in Abo is that they are on the rather peculiar kind of squared paper on which all his prison letters were written. “A Letter to Louise” was written in the spring of 1920 and therefore presumably in Finland, though possibly after his return to Moscow. Chapter XXI

Reed described his impressions of Moscow and Petrograd in June and July in his article for the Liberator. Emma Goldman speaks of Reed’s return from Finland in My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924), and Living My Life (1931). Her statement that he felt his life had been needlessly jeop­ ardized, made only in the latest of these three accounts, is not sup­ ported by information from other sources. The letters to Louise Bryant are in the L.B.C. Jacob Rubin in I Live to Tell (1934) has stated that in June, 1920, Reed confessed to him that he was no longer a Communist. The events described in this chapter are sufficient refutation of this story, but doubt is also cast on it by: 1 ) the extremely questionable nature of much of the other material in the book; 2) the implausibility of Reed’s making such a confession to Rubin, who was posing as a Bol­ shevik sympathizer, rather than to, say, Emma Goldman, who was opposed to the regime; 3) Rubin’s ignorance of Reed’s movements, as shown in his statement that Reed spent the summer in the Cau­ casus; 4) the unlikelihood of Reed’s having made certain of the statements Rubin attributes to him, e.g., “In the United States I hated the capitalist system, but I was at liberty to get up on a street comer and express myself.” The story would not even be worth bothering to contradict if it had not been given wide publicity by the Associated Press. The account of the Comintern congress is based on Reed’s article, “The World Congress of the Communist International,” published in the Communist, #10 (no date), on the stenographic report, Pro­ tokolle des 11 Kongresses der Kommunistischen Internationale (Moscow, 1920), on The Second Congress of the Communist Inter­ national (translations of reports in the Russian papers, published by

the division of Russian affairs of the State Department, Washington,

BIBLIOGRAPHY 6.

431

Signed Newspaper Reports

“Rise of Bandit Villa,” N. Y. World, Mar. i, 1914. “Torreon Is Captured in Terrific Battle,” N. Y. World, Mar. 25, 1914. “Whole Country Left a Waste,” N. Y. World, Mar. 29, 1914. “Madly Charging While Hundreds Died, Villa’s Men Won Way to City,” N. Y. World, Mar. 31, 1914. “Mrs. Villa Is Told of Torreon’s Fall and a Massacre,” N. Y. World, Apr. 1, 1914. “Saltillo and Monterey Next to be Attacked,” N. Y. World, Apr. 4, 1914. “Writer Once Jailed with I.W.W. Describes Meeting,” N. Y. World, Apr. 12, 1914. “Germany Has Shot Her Bolt,” N. Y. World, Dec. 26, 1915. “Bandit in Mountains Can Hold His Retreat,” N. Y. American, Mar. 13, 1916. “U. S. in Danger of Mountain Ambush,” N. Y. American, Apr. 16, 1916. “Why I Am for Wilson,” New Orleans States, Sept. 27, 1916, and other papers. “A City of Violence,” N. Y. Tribune, Oct. 29, 1916. “Whose War?” N. Y. Call, Mar. 18, 1917. “The Most Tragic Incident I Saw in the War,” N. Y. World, Apr. 22, 1917. “The Fall of the Russian Bastile,” N. Y. Tribune, Mar. 25, 1917. ‘Why I Am Against Conscription,” N. Y. Call, Apr. 19, 1917. “Poisoner Waite Went to Death Chair With Sign of Neither Fear Nor Re­ morse,” N. Y. Mail, May 25, 1917. “25,000 May Refuse to Register for Conscription in New York,” N. Y. Mail, June i, 1917. “Benny Leonard’s Life Story,” N. Y. Mail, June 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1917. “Sees Failure of Irish Council,” N. Y. Mail, June 6, 1917. “Wealth, Beauty, War—Skylark,” N. Y. Mail, June 7, 1917. “Disease Greater Peril Than War to America’s Army,” N. Y. Mail, June 11, 1917. “Macdougal Alley Trips to the Relief of War Horrors,” N. Y. Mail, June 13, 1917. “Great Excess War Profits Escape,” N. Y. Mail, June 13, 1917. “Big Business Has No Answer to Excess War Profit Plan,” N. Y. Mail, June 14» 1917* “Taxes for Deficits of the Poor While Rich Escape War Costs,” N. Y. Mail, June 15, 1917. “Rich Men Patriotic Until It Costs Money, Says Pinchot,” N. Y. Mail, June 16, 1917. “England’s Excess Profits Tax Example for U. S. War Financing,” N. Y. Mail, June 18, 1917. ‘War Tax on All, Maxim’s Plan,” N. Y. Mail, June 19, 1917. “Russian Sailors Declare Republic and Run Warship by Committee,” N. Y. Mail, June 19, 1917. “Senate Balks at High Tax on War Profits,” N. Y. Mail, June 20, 1917. “Public Opinion Forcing Senate to Profits Tax,” N. Y. Mail, June 21, 1917. “Senators Very Silent on Tax of War Profits,” N. Y. Mail, June 22, 1917.

432

JOHN REED

“Ten Senators Pledge Battle for 50% War Profit Tax,” N. Y. Mail, June 23, 1917. “Big Interests Unite to Fight Heavy Tax on Excess Profits,” N. Y. Mail, June 25, 1917. “Senate Gentle in Taxing Rich, Heavy on Poor,” N. Y. Mail, June 28, 1917. “Capital Swelters Under Stupefying Pressure of War,” N. Y. Mail, July 3, i9i7.

“Every U. S. Soldier to Have French Girl as ‘Marraine,’ ” N. Y. Mail, July 5, Ï9Ï7. “Hoboken Waterfront Wide Open Strip for Late Merrymakers,” N. Y. Mail, July 10, 1917. “Blast Side Exiles Stirred by Russian Envoy’s ‘Welcome Home,’ ” N. Y. Mail, July 11, 1917. “Woods Refuses to Allow Police to be ‘Whitewashed,’ ” N. Y. Mail, July 14, 1917. “Joy in Yaphank Over Building of Camp Upton,” N. Y. Mail, July 16, 1917. “Vast Plot Hides ‘Higher ups’ in Baff’s Murder,” N. Y. Mail, July 17, 1917. “Make Profiteers Pay for War; No Stomach Tax, Says F. S. Howe,” N. Y. Mail, July 19, 1917. “Wilson Pardon Aids Suffrage,” N. Y. Mail, July 19, 1917. “John Reed Falls Down Hard on Beautiful Muckraking Story,” N. Y. Mail, July 20, 1917. “World of Strange Adventures Under Broadway Outdoes Movies,” N. Y. Mail, July 21, 1917. “Roumanian Soldier Finds His Way from Russian Front to America,” N. Y. Mail, July 24, 1917. “With the Poor in the City of Dreadful Night,” N. Y. Mail, July 27, 1917. “Sunken Gardens in Central Park Mere Plaything of the Rich,” N. Y. Mail, July 27, 1917. “Bowery Still Home of Nation’s Masterless Men,” N. Y. Mail, July 30, 1917. “One Spot in New York Where Grass May be Used to Lie Upon,” N. Y. Mail, July 30, 1917. “Giddy Saratoga Throngs Forget All About War,” N. Y. Mail, Aug. 2, 1917. “Old Home Week for the Spirits Puts Lily Dale, N. Y., on the Map,” N. Y. Mail, Aug. 3, 1917. “Ed Martin is There Hovering,” N. Y. Mail, Aug. 4, 1917. “Spirit Contrqls at Lily Dale,” N. Y. Mail, Aug. 6, 1917. “Mrs. De Saulles, Ill, Taken from Cell to Sheriff’s Home,” N. Y. Mail, Aug. 7, 1917. “Sicilian Duse Thrills East Side,” N. Y. Mail, Aug. 8, 1917. “John Al Raschid Reviews Night Scenes on the East Side,” N. Y. Mail, Aug. 9, 1917. “World Sick of War, Socialists Tell U. S.,” N. Y. Call, Sept. 9, 1917. “John Reed Cables the Call News of Bolshevik Revolt,” N. Y. Call, Nov. 22, 1917. “Bourgeoisie Forced Bolshevik Uprising, John Reed Says,” N. Y. Call, Dec. 26, 1917. “Bolshevik, Foes of All Imperialism,” N. Y. Call, May 1, 1918.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

433

“The Great Russian Offensive,” N. Y. Call, July 27, 1918. “Deportation-Where?” N. Y. Call, Mar. 30, 1919.

Book Reviews

7.

The Upbuilders, by Lincoln Steffens. Harvard Monthly, MarM 1910. Who, Where, and Why is Villa? by A. Margo. Masses, May, 1917. Glad of Earth, by Clement Wood. Masses, May, 1917. The Labor Movement in Japan, by Sen Katayama. Liberator, Mar., 1919. Bolshevism, by John Spargo. New York Tribune, May 3, 1919. 8.

Miscellaneous

Rooster, 1904-05, 12 issues. Unsigned jokes and verse. Lampoon, 1906-11, vols. 52*61. Unsigned jokes and verse; may be identified from indexes in bound volumes. Harvard Monthly, 1910, vol 49. Editorials, initialed. Masses, 1913-17, vols. 4-9. Editorial and other notes, initialed. “The Bolsheviki,” letter to The Public, Oct. 19, 1918. “The Dead and the Living,” extract from letter, Liberator, Feb., 1921.

II. WORKS ABOUT JOHN REED i.

Book

One of Us, lithographs by Lynd Ward and narrative by Granville Hicks, New York, 1935. 2.

Articles

Anonymous, “Insurgent Reed,” Metropolitan Bulletin, July 15, 1916. Anonymous, “John Reed,” Communist, *10 (no date). Balahonova, Angelica, “John Reed, Poet and Revolutionist,” Souvenir Program of the John Reed Memorial, Oct. 17, 1921. Beer, Thomas, “Playboy,” American Mercury, June, 1934. Bernard, Elmer H., “Storm Boy,” Harvard Graduates* Magazine, Mar., 1934. Brown, Rose, “John Reed’s Yoiîth,” Moscow Daily News, Oct. 17, 1935. Bryant, Louise, “Last Days with John Reed,” Liberator, Feb., 1921. Dell, Floyd, Introduction to Daughter of the Revolution, New York, 1927. Dell, Floyd, “John Reed: Revolutionist,” New York Call, Oct. 31, 1920. Dinamov, Sergei, “The Literary Method of John Reed,” Literature of the World Revolution, #4, 1931. Dosch-Fleurot, Amo, “World Man Tells of Reed in Russia,” New York World, Oct. 19, 1920. Dos Passos, John, “Jack Reed,” New Masses, Oct., 1930. Eastman, Max, “John Reed,” Liberator, Dec., 1920. Frost, Stanley, “John Reed—Revolution as a Sport,” New York Tribune, Mar. 27, 1919. Gilebaux, Henri, “John Reed,” Russian Press Review, Oct. 29, 1920. Gold, Michael, “John Reed and the Real Thing,” New Masses, Nov., 1927.

JOHN REED

434

Hicks, Granville, Introduction to Ten Days That Shook the World, New York, 1935. Hicks, Granville, “John Reed,” New Masses, Dec., 1932. Hicks, Granville, “John Reed,” Soviet Russia Today, Oct., 1935. Hunt, Edward Eyre, “Prophets of Rebellion,” Outlook, Mar. 8, 1925. Hunt, Edward Eyre, “Stelligeri—A Footnote'on Democracy,” in Essays in Memory of Barrett Wendell, Cambridge, 1926. Karsner, David, “John Reed and Billy Williams: Two Portraits,” New York Call Oct. 24, 1920. Lippmann, Walter, “Legendary John Reed,” New Republic, Dec. 26, 1914. Mason, Gregory, “Reed, Villa, and the Village,” Outlook, May 6, 1925. Minor, Robert, “John Reed,” The Red Album, Cleveland, 1921. Monroe, Harriet, “Two Poets Have Died,” Poetry, Jan., 1921. Pass, Joseph, “John Reed—Revolutionary Symbol,” Daily Worker, Oct. 24, 1931. Reinstein, Boris, “John Reed,” Die Kommunistische Internationale, #14 (no date). Robinson, Boardman, “A Memory,” Liberator, Feb., 1921. Steffens, Lincoln, “The Boy from Oregon,” The Partisan, Dec., 1933. Steffens, Lincoln, “John Reed,” Freeman, Nov. 3, 1920. (Reprinted as pamphlet, with introduction by Clarence Darrow, Chicago, 1921.) Street, Julian, “A Soviet Saint: The Story of John Reed,” Saturday Evening Post, Sept. 13, 1930. Tudbury, Moran, “Young Immortals: John Reed,” College Humor, Apr., 1932. Varine, “John Reed,” Bulletin Communiste, Nov. 11, 1920.

3.

Books Mentioning John Reed

Beatty, Bessie, The Red Heart of Russia, New York, 1918. Berkman, Alexander, The Bolshevik Myth, New York, 1925. Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda, 66th Congress, ist session, Senate document 62, Washington, 1919. Bryant, Louise, Six Red Months in Russia, New York, 1918. Dell, Floyd, Homecoming: an Autobiography, New York, 1933. Deutsch, Helen, and Hanau, Stella, The Provincetown: a Story of the Theatre, New York, 1931. Draper, Muriel, Music at Midnight, New York, 1929. Dunn, Robert, Five Fronts, New York, 1915. Eaton, W. P., 'The Theatre Guild: the First Ten Years, New York, 1929. Farson, Negley, The Way of a Transgressor, New York, 1936. Francis, David R., Russia from the American Embassy, April, 1916-November, 1918, New York, 1921. Glaspell, Susan, The Road to the Temple, New York, 1927. Goldman, Emma, Living My Life, New York, 1931. Goldman, Emma, My Disillusionment in Russia, New York, 1923. Goldman, Emma, My Further Disillusionment in Russia, New York, 1924. Hard, William, Raymond Robin's Own Story, New York, 1920. Harrison, Marguerite, Marooned in Moscow, New York, 1921. Harrison, Marguerite, There's Always Tomorrow, New York, 1935. Haywood, William D., Bill Haywood's Book, New York, 1929.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

435

Hillquit, Morris, Loose Leaves from a Busy Life, New York, 1934. Kreymborg, Alfred, Troubadour: an Autobiography, New York, 1925. Mayer, Edwin Justus, A Preface to Life, New York, 1923. Parry, Albert, Garrets and Pretenders, New York, 1933. Revolutionary Radicalism, Its History, Purpose and Tactics (Report of the Joint Legislative Committee investigating Seditious Activities), Albany, 1920. Rubin, Jacob H., 1 Live to Tell, Indianapolis, 1934. Sheridan, Clare, Mayfair to Moscow, New York, 1921. Sisson, Edgar, One Hundred Red Days, New Haven, 1931. Steffens, Lincoln, Autobiography, New York, 1931. Steiger, John N., The Memoirs of a Silk Striker, Paterson, 1914. Stein, Gertrude, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, New York, 1933. Taggard, Genevieve (editor), May Days, An Anthology of Verse from MassesLiberator, New York, 1925. Towne, Charles Hanson, This New York of Mine, New York, 1931. Vorse, Mary Heaton, A Footnote to Folly, New York, 1935. Williams, Albert Rhys, Through the Russian Revolution, New York, 1921. Young, Art, On My Way, New York, 1928.

INDEX Achmet Effendi, 200 Adams, Franklin P., 86, 101 Adams, Joseph 34-5, 40, 57, 68, 147» 384 Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 65, 92 Addams, Jane, 143, 380 Aguglia, Mimi, 242 Aiken, Conrad, 48 Alladdin, 259 Altgeld, J. P., 362 Ammons, E. E., 142 Anderson, Sherwood, 93, 245, 329, 363 Andrews, Robert E^ 67, 70, 79 Andreyev, L. N., 175 Andreytchine, George, 311 Antonov-Ovseenko, 271 Ashleigh, Charles, 311 Ashley, Jessie, 102-3 Axelrod, 254

Bacon, Robert, 215 Baker, George P., 26, 32, 45, 47 Baker, Ray Stannard, 65 Baklanov, 280 Baldwin, Roger, 324 Barker, Granville, 175-6 Barker, W. B., 46 Barnes, Djuna, 240 * Barnes, Earl B., 314, 316, 319-20 Baruch, Bernard M., 383 Batt, Dennis E., 361 Beatty, Bessie, 259, 274-5, 337 Becker, Maurice, 92, 95, 109 Bela Kun, 344, 398 Bell, Josephine, 304 Bellows, George W., 109, 179, 208 Belmont, Raymond, 29 Benchley, Robert, 66 Bennett, Arnold, 112, 170 Benson, Allan, 235 Benton, William, 127 Bercovici, Konrad, 229 Berger, Victor, 92, 173, 353, 360

Berkman, Alexander, 237-8, 244, 260, 280, 314 Bernstein, Herman, 313 Bernstoff, Count, 228 Beveridge, Albert J., 164 Binger, Carl, 225 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 245 Boissevain, Eugen, 249 Boudin, Louis B., 363 Bourne, Randolph, 245, 384 Boyce, Neith, 65, 219 Boyd, F. Sumner, 103, no-i, 144, 150, 155, 161, 181, 348 Boyden, Albert C., 79, 384 Brandeis, Louis D., 224 Breshkovskaya, Catherine, 259, 332, 348 Brisbane, Arthur, 240 Brooks, Alden, 57 Brooks, Van Wyck, 48, 245 Brown, Robert C., 41 Browne, Thomas Q., 16 Brubaker, Howard, 95 Bryan, William Jennings, 145, 149, 208-10, 216-21 Bryant, Louise, 205-6, 208, 212, 216-21, 224-5, 239-42, 249-54, 257-8, 269, 271-4, 278-9, 285, 287, 292, 294, 297-8, 302-3, 307, 313, 331-5, 340, 347-9, 356, 3^3» 367» 370» 380-6, 389-90, 396, 398401 Buchanan, George, 194, 196 Bukharin, Nikolai, 402 Bullard, Arthur, 322 Burleson, A. S., 312 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 65 Bums, William J., 19-20 Burr, Edward, 4, 380 Burr, Katherine, 4 Bursch, Frederick C., 231 Burtsev, 265 Butler, Arthur P., 16 Byedny, Demyan, 374 437

438

INDEX

Cadman, S. Parkes, 231 Canfield, Dorothy, 65 Carb, David, 219 Carman, Bliss, 83 Carney, Jack, 361 Carranza, Venustiano, 117, 129, 130-1, 136, 138 Carroll, Recorder, 98 Carruth, Hayden, 92 Castillo, Maximo, 127 Chadwick, Carl, 44, 57 Chaliapin, Feodor, 261, 387, 392 Chamberlain, Kenneth R., 109 Channing, Edward, 26 Chaplin, Ralph, 311 Chase, Stuart, 310 Chernov, V. M., 293 Chesterton, G. K., 56 Chkheidze, N. H., 261 Claessens, August, 360 Clapp, Edwin J., 237 Clark, W. A., 215 Clarke, John H., 224 Clemenceau, Georges, 328 Cleveland, Grover, 2, 362 Cobb, Irvin S., 66, 86 Cockran, Bourke, 380 Coffin, Howard E., 215 Cohen, Maximilian, 344, 349, 358 Colby, Bainbridge, 380, 382 Coldwell, J. M., 360 Coleman, Glenn O., 109 Conrad, Joseph, 112 Cook, George Cram, 219, 221, 223, 357 Copeland, Charles Townsend, 35-7, 47, 49, 60, 65-4, 83, 112, 134, 137, 145, 247, 308, 401 Corbett, Henry W., 1 Couzens, James, 306 Craig, Gordon, 104 Crane, Stephen, 134 Creel, George,-142, 223, 240, 295, 321-2 Croly, Herbert, 170, 172 Crowder, Enoch, 250 Daly, William H., 87 Damrosch, Frank, 19, 21 Dan, F., 261, 273 Dana, H. W. L., 305 Daoud Bey, 200 Dasburg, Andrew, 96, 161 Davidson, Jo, 96 Davis, Allan, 33 Davis, Francis W., 44 Davis, Jerome, 337

Davis, Richard Harding, 112, 125, 134, 180 Davis, Stuart, 109, 214 Debs, Eugene V., 93, 298, 309, 311, 327, 345. 3 374i 382, 385, 389-90, 394, 398 Leonard, Benny, 242 Leonard, H. C., 2

Leonard, Robert F., 332 Levien, Sonya, 188 Lewis, Sinclair, 384 Lianozov, Stepan, 264 Lieber, M. I., 261, 273 Liebknecht, Karl, 164, 328 Lindsay, Vachel, 85, 93, 213 Lindsey, Ben B., 143 Lippmann, Walter, 32-4, 38, 48-9, 64, 75, 80, 82, 92, 100, 112, 134-5, I7I"4* 176, 178, 188, 225, 384 Littell, Philip, 171 Little, Clarence C., 46 Little, Frank, 311, 375 Liveright, Horace, 325, 353, 382 Lloyd George, David, 328-9 Lloyd, William Bross, 355 Locke, W. J., 65 Lockhart, R. H. Bruce, 298 London, Meyer, 353 Lore, Ludwig, 324 Lowell, Amy, 245 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 38-40, 69, 74 Lunacharsky, A., 264, 374 Lunn, G. R., 82, 174, 353 Lusk, Clayton R., 370 Luxemburg, Rosa, 328 Lvov, G. J., 259

MacAlpine, Eadmonn, 324, 349-50, 358 MacGowan, Kenneth, 40, 48 Mack, Willard, 308 MacKaye, James, 40 MacKaye, Percy, 40, 45, 85, 101 MacNeille, Raymond, 339 MacNider, Hanford, 46 Madero, Francisco, 128 Magruder, Alexander R., 382 Makino, N., 328-9 Malmberg, Aino, 379, 383, 386 Malone, Dudley Field, 260, 303, 316 Manton, Martin, 318 Marlowe, Ch*ristopher, 300 Marquis, Don, 68, 112, 365 Martens, Ludwig C. A. K., 349 Martin, Edward S., 42 Martin, George W., 41-3 Martov, L., 265 Marx, Karl, 230, 252, 283, 292, 327, 342“3» 352» 362 Marye, George T., 192-6 Masson, Tom, 66, 87, 92 Masters, Edgar Lee, 213 Matthews, Jack, 20 Maxim, Hudson, 215

INDEX McBride, Captain, 99 McCormick, Officer, 97 McCoy, Samuel Duff, 68, 70, 80-2, 179 McMullin, John, 104 McNary, Charles L., 380 Mellen, Charles S., 44-5 Melnichansky, George, 286 Mencken, H. L., 93 Menzhinsky, V. R., 276 Mercado, General, 113 Merwin, Samuel, 90 Miller, Spencer, Jr., 204-5, 20$ Milyukov, P., 259 Minor, Robert, 298 Moderwell, Hiram, 213 Modestino, Valentine, 99, 103 Moeller, Philip, 175 Monroe, Harriet, 85, 366 Moody, William Vaughn, 28 Mooney, Tom, 244, 280, 324, 327 Moran, Frank, 208 Morgan, J. P., 215, 362 Morris, Benjamin W., 96 Mountsier, Robert, 207 Münsterberg, Hugo, 26 Murphy, 402 Myers, Gustavus, 92 Nearing, Scott, 323-4 Neilson, William Allan, 26, 47, 216-7 Nelles, Walter, 316 Nelson, Henry J., 339 Nelson, John M., 232 Nelson, Knute, 330-7 Nelson, Walter M., 307 Nevinson, H. W.,170 Nietzsche, F., 75 Nock, Albert Jay, 65, 79, 85, 223, 384 Nogin, V. P., 286 Nordfeldt, Dion, 219 * Nuorteva, Santeri, 305, 323, 399-400 O’Hare, Kate Richards, 357 O’Neill, Eugene, 219-20, 245, 384 Oppenheim, James, 245 Orlando, V., 328 Orozco, Pascual, 113, 137 Osborne, Thomas Mott, 204-5 Osgood, Alan, 67, 79-80, 82, 384 Osgood, J. C., 142 Overman, Lee S., 330-7 Owens, Edgar, 361 Palmer, A. Mitchell, 330, 370, 377 Palmer, George Herbert, 26

441

Panin, 254 Panina, Sofia, 289 Panken, Jacob, 360 Parker, Alton B., 19 Parson, Eric, 225 Peabody, Josephine Preston, 56 Peirce, Waldo, 51-65 Pemberton, Brock, 175 Penney, Owen W., 389, 394 Pershing, John J., 207, 219 Pew, Marlen E., 308 Phillips, John S., 79, 82, 384 Pickering, W. T., 34-5 Pilsudsky, Marshal, 387, 390 Podvoisky, 271 Poole, Ernest, 102, 164 Post, Louis F., 380 Potter, Grace, 233 Prevey, Margaret, 362 Price, Lucien, 28 Pulitzer, Joseph, 137 Quinlan, Patrick, 98 Radcliff, Sheriff, 100 Radek, Karl, 392-5, 398, 402 Ranck, F. V., 218 Recht, Charles, 316 Redzianske, 259 Reed, C. J., 1, 4, 6-8, 14, 16, 19-21, 29, 42, 45-6, 51, 64, 75, 77, 107, 178, 204, 384 Reed, Henry G., 5, 9, 30, 76, 106, 235, 308, 349 Reed, John Silas Ancestry, 1-5 Character, appearance, etc., 10-2, 13-5, 21-3, 30-1, 44, 47-50, 60-1, 71, 106-8, 176-7, 239, 246-8, 260, 271, 279, 283-4, 302» 3*4» 346» 392-3» 398-9 Drama, interest in, and plays by, 9, 33, 72, 100-4, 109, 176-7, 213-4, 219-21, 328, 391 Fiction, 22, 48, 66, 83, 174-5, 221-2, 384 Life, birth, 1; early boyhood, 4; at Portland Academy, 7, camping trip, 11; at Morristown School, 16-23; enters Harvard, 24; elected to staffs of Monthly and Lam­ poon, 30; college escapades, 34-5; college achievements, 38; song­ leader, 40; defeated for ivy orator, 41; made member of Hasty Pud-

442

INDEX

Reed, John S'Aas-Continued ding Club, 42; graduation, 46; goes to England on cattle boat, 51; held for murder of Waldo Peirce, 54; walking trip in Wales and England, 55; goes to France, 57; travels in Spain, 58; trip in southern France, 62; is engaged to Madeleine Filon, 63; returns to Portland, 64; goes to work on American Magazine, 64; engage­ ment broken, 65; first literary successes, 66; lives at 42 Washing­ ton Square, 67; takes Edward Hunt to Bermuda, 68; death of father, 75; writes The Day in Bohemia, 77; returns to New York City, 81; writes Everymagazine, 87; becomes editor of Masses, 94; arrested in Paterson, 97; stages Paterson pageant, 100; goes to Italy, 104; becomes man­ aging editor of Masses, 109; goes to Mexico for Metropolitan, 112; interviews Villa, 114; goes to Jiminez, 119; joins General Ur­ bina, 123; sees military action, 125; interviews Carranza, 129; re­ ports battle of Torreon, 132; returns to New York, reports free-speech meeting, 136; writes against intervention in Mexico, 137; goes to Ludlow, 138; at Provincetown, 144; dedicates In­ surgent Mexico to Copeland, 145; interviews President Wilson, 146; re-visits Portland, 148; goes to Europe as Metropolitans war­ correspondent, 150; in Italy, 151; in Paris, 152; attempts to reach front, 154; goes to London, 155; returns to-France, 161; goes to Berlin, 163; at the German front, 165; returns to United States, 170; annoyed by Lippmann’s article, 173; writes Enter Dibble, 175; quarrels with Theodore Roose­ velt, 179; interviews Billy Sunday, 180; refused permission to go to France, 181; sails for Italy with Boardman Robinson, 183; reaches Serbia, 184; suffers from infected kidney, 187; enters Russia il­ legally, 188; arrested in Cholm, 190; difficulties in Petrograd, 192;

permitted to leave, 196; in Buch­ arest, 197; in Constantinople, 199; reports Bulgaria’s entrance into war, 201; returns to United States, 202; speaks at Harvard Club and Sing Sing, 204; goes to Portland, meèts Louise Bryant, 205; opposes intervention in Mexico, 207; in­ terviews Bryan, 208; plans labor theatre, 213; attacks preparedness, 215; attends political conventions, 216; interviews Henry Ford, 218; The War in Eastern Europe pub­ lished, 219; helps organize Prov­ incetown Players, 219; reports Bayonne strike, 223; supports President Wilson, 223; enters Johns Hopkins hospital, 224; left kidney removed, 225; breaks with Metropolitan, 228; publishes Tamburlaine, 231; speaks at peace meeting, 233; appears before Congressional committees on es­ pionage and conscription, 234; en­ ters employ of New York Mail, 237; work for Mail, 240; work for Masses, 242; writes “This Un­ popular War,” 245; writes “Al­ most Thirty,” 246; sails for Rus­ sia, 250; in Christiania, 253; in Stockholm, interviews Huysmans, 254; reaches Petrograd, 258; spied upon, 260; goes to northern front, 261; interviews Lianozov, 264; in­ terviews Kerensky, 268; sees be­ ginning of revolution, 271; wit­ nesses capture of Winter Palace, 274; watches progress of revolu­ tion, 275; goes to Tsarskoe Syelo, 280; given statement by Lenin, 282; goes to Moscow, 285; works for propaganda bureau, 290; speaks to Congress of Soviets, 294; appointed consul to New York, 295; appointment with­ drawn, 296; delayed in Stock­ holm, 297; begins book on revolu­ tion, 299; writes “America, 1918,” 300; arrested on reaching New York, 303; speaks on Russia, 305; arrested in Philadelphia, 306; blacklisted by the magazines, 307; interviews Debs, 309; reports I.W.W. trial, 310; resigns from Liberator, 312; arrested in New

INDEX Reed, John Silas—Continued York on sedition charge, 314; tried with other editors of the Masses, 315; exposes Sisson for­ geries, 321; speaks on anniversary of the revolution, 323; beçomes contributing editor of the Rev­ olutionary Age, 324; writes Ten Days That Shook the World, 325; writes “The Peace That Passeth Understanding,” 328; ap­ pears before Overman committee, 330; attacked in the press, 338; on trial in Philadelphia, 339; debates with Joseph Snaplen, 342; be­ comes member of city committee of New York left wing, 344; pre­ pares Press Forum debate, 348; becomes editor of New York Communist, 349; writes on de­ mocracy for the Communist, 354; reports A.F. of L. convention, 354; attends left-wing conference, 355; goes to Truro, 357; resigns from Revolutionary Age, 358; ex­ pelled from Socialist convention, 359; active in Communist Labor Party convention, 362; sails for Russia, 366; reaches Christiania, 367; reaches Stockholm, smuggled into Finland, 368; delayed in Hel­ singfors, 370; reaches Russia, 371; observes changes, 373; writes on American labor movement, 375; goes to Volga valley, 376; fails to leave Russia by way of Latvia, 378; arrested in Finland, 379; re­ leased, 386; recuperates in Mos­ cow, 388; prepares for congress of Communist International, 389; appointed to commissions, 392; speaks on labor unions, 393; ap­ pointed to E.C.C.I., 394; goes to Baku, 396; speaks on American imperialism, 397; joins Louise Bryant in Moscow, 398; stricken with typhus, 400; death, 401 Literature, attitude towards, 10, 75, 86, 91, 107, 134-5, 144, 197-8, 210-1, 283, 302 Poetry, 18-9, 22-3, 49, 67, 76-81, 83-6, 211-3, 225-7, 299-302» 329, 384 Radicalism, development of, 20, 41-5, 73, 97-103, 106-7, no-1, n7* 134-5, 139-144, 160, 172-4, 223-4,

443

229-31, 247, 259-60, 266-7, *68, 283-4, 295-6» 302, 313» 327» 342-7» 352-3» 363-4» 374-5» 389» 393-5» 4™ World War, views on, 149-51, 153, 156-160, 161-3, 168-9, U0-1* 181-2, 186-7, 202-3, 206-7, 215-6, 223-4, 231-7» 242-4, 247, 308 Reed, Margaret, 1, 4, 7, 8, 13, 15-6, 64, 75, 77, 106-7, H8» 204-5, 308, 347» 349» 384» 399» 4«*1 Reed, Simeon G., 1, 6 Reinhardt, Max, 108 Reinstein, Boris, 261, 290-1, 294, 402 Riazanov, D. B., 276 Roberts, John, 132 Robins, Raymond, 259, 292, 296, 322, 335» 337 Robinson, Boardman, 180-1, 183-203, 223, 259, 266 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 28, 85 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 140-3 Rodin, A., 75 Rodman, Henrietta, no, 223, 384 Rogers, Frank, 311 Rogers, Merrill, 304, 320 Rogers, Robert E., 67, 69-70, 80, 82, 99, 107, 112, 210, 219, 240, 384 Roosevelt, Theodore, 14, 47, 75, 146, 178-81, 206, 215, 217, 228, 242-3, 295 Root, Elihu, 215, 243 Rosmer, A., 402 Royce, Josiah, 26 Rubinstein, Arthur, 104 Rumely, Edward A., 237, 242 Russell, Charles Edward, 237, 295, 34b 348 Ruthenberg, C. E., 357-8, 361 Rykov, A. L, 286 Sammons, Wheeler, 45 Sandburg, Carl, 85, 93, 213, 245, 354 Santayana, George, 26, 28, 45 Sayler, Oliver M., 337 Sazonov, 194, 196 Scheidemann, 328 Schmidt, Hans, 208 Schofield, W. H., 44, 59 Schreider, 278 Scott, Howard, 345 Scott, Leroy, 92, 213 Seeger, Alan, 38, 45, 48-9, 81-2, 384 Selim Senudah, 45 Seltzer, Thomas, 92, 110 Semenov, 322 Seratov. 271

444

INDEX

Shallenberger, A. C., 235 Shaplen, Joseph, 342 Shatoff, Anna, 259 Shatoff, Bill, 259-60, 271-2 Shaw, George Bernard, 75, 112, 175-6 Shay, Frank, 73, 384 Sheldon, Edward, 47 Sheldon, George R., 215 Shelley, Percy B., 75 Sheridan, Clare, 399 Siddall, John, 65, 75, 79, 384 Simmons, Roger E., 332 Simons, George A., 332 Simonson, Lee, 32, 48, 96, 172 Sinclair, Upton, 93, 143, 323, 346 Sisson, Edgar, 295-7, 3°4» 3 21-2 * Sloan, John, 92, 95, 109, 214 Slobodin, Henry, 235, 348 Spaeth, Sigmund, 237 Spargo, John, 92, 235, 353 Stalin, Joseph, 297 Stark, Louis, 354 Steams, Harold, 384 Stedman, Seymour, 316-20, 339, 360 Steffens, Lincoln, 49, 64-66, 68-70, 72“3» 75» 77“®» ®2“4» 0» II1-2» ”7» 135-6, 145, 147, 162, 170, 176, 181, 223, 240, 247, 297-8, 308, 384 Stein, Gertrude, 104 Stein, Leo, 384 Sterling, Thomas, 330 Stevenson, Archibald E., 330-ï Stokes, J. G. Phelps, 235 Stokes, Rose Pastor, 327, 344, 350, 361 Stone, Melville E., 45 Stotesbury, Edward T., 215 Straight, Mrs. Willard, 171 Street, Julian, 65, 67, 83, 87, 90 Sullivan, Frank W., 41, 46 Sunday, William A., 179-80, 229 Swinburne, Algernon C., 49

Taft, William Howard, 65 Tannenbaum, Frank, 384 Tarasov-Radionov, 322 Tarbell, Ida M., 65 Tarkington, Booth, 112 Taussig, F. W., 26 Taylor, Frederick, 65 Taylor, Graham, 322 Taylor, Harold, 63 Tchudnovsky, 269 Teasdale, Sara, 85 Terrazas, Luis, 128 Terrazas, Sylvestre, 114

Thacher, Thomas, 337 Thayer, William Roscoe, 45 Thomas, Albert, 254 Towne, Charles Hanson, 87 Träubel, Horace, no, 341 Tresca^ Carlo, 98, 101, 103, 106, 365 Trotsky, Leon, 270-1, 297-8, 332, 353, 372» 39® . Troubetskoi, Prince, 189 Trull inger, Paul, 205, 224, 333 TsereteUi, Heracles, 261 Tunney, Thomas J., 330 Turner, John Kenneth, 208 Untermeyer, Louis, 85, 95 Urbina, Tomas, 122-4, *35

Vallejo, Juan, 125 Vanderlip, Frank A., 243 Van Dyke, Henry, 231 Van Koi, 254 Van Lear, Thomas, 353 Van Vechten, Carl, 104 Viereck, George Sylvester, 81, 83 Villa, Francisco, 112-20, 127-36, 145, 178, 207-8, 219 Villard, Henry, 6 Villard, Oswald G., 307 Viag, Piet, 92 Voidnsky, 262 Volodarsky, V., 271, 322 Vorse, Mary Heaton, 92, 219, 384

Wagenknecht, Alfred, 357, 363 Waite, Arthur W., 242 Waldman, Louis, 350, 353 Wallas, Graham, 33 Wallerstein, David, 339-40 Walling, William English, 92, 95, 235 Walsh, Thomas J., 331 Walters, Carl, 148, 205-6, 356 Walters, Helen, 148, 205-6, 356 Wardwell, Allen, 337 Weinstein, Gregory, 324 Wells, H. G., 33, 56, 170 Wendell, Barrett, 26 Westley, Helen, 96 Weyl, Walter E., 171 Wheeler, John, 218 Wheelock, John Hall, 28, 30 Whigham, H. 175, 177-9, 221, 228-9, 3®° White, William Allen, 65 Whitman, Walt, 49, 75, 79, 227, 300-2, 341

INDEX Whitney, Harry Payne, 112, 215 Willard, Jess, 208 Williams, Albert Rhys, 259, 261, 264, 272, 274-5, 290-1, *94» 322, 33i-2> 334-5, 337 Williams, Frankwood E., 244 Williams, Gluyas, 45, 61-2 Wilmerding, Christian, 3 Wilson, Woodrow, 95, 112, 127, 137, 145-7, 178, 217, 223-4, 228» 232"4» 240, 243, 256, 295, 314, 328-9 Winslow, Horatio, 92 Winter, Alice Beach, 92 Winter, Charles A., 92 Wister, Owen, 47 Withington, Lothrop, 60 Wolcott, Josiah O., 330-7 Wood, Charles Erskine Scott, 10-1, 49-50» 314

445

Wood, Eugene, 92 Wood, Leonard, 215, 243 Woodman, Francis C., 16 Woods, Arthur, 136 Wrangel, Peter, 387, 397, 401 Wright, Willard Huntington, 83 Young, Art, 92, 95, 109, 214, 217, 229, 304, 308-10, 320 Young, Doctor, 225 Yudenitch, General, 367, 372

Zalkind, 270 Zangwill, Israel, 112 Zinoviev, Gregory, 270, 285, 297, 390, 392» 394-5» 398 # Zorach, Marguerite, 219, 221 Zorach, William, 219, 221 Zorin, 259, 272